Updated with the IMF benchmarking chart below.
The cost of living is always a pressure point for many households.
Perceptions of "what groceries cost" drives fundamental sentiment about wellbeing. As as such it is always a political issue, and in election years, an election issue.
That is so even if the data shows that both food and grocery costs aren't actually rising faster than overall inflation. Political forces accentuate the fears, trying to make it 'true'.
Regular readers will know we cover these issues closely here. Not only in the official inflation stats and the official household spending data (the Q3 Household Living Cost data is due out at the end of October). We also follow the Infometrics/Foodstuffs supplier cost monitoring. And we have our own grocery basket monitoring. All these measures are consistently showing the same overall result of tame increases recently, even though they all come using different data sets from different angles.
But we recently stumbled on another view - an international one. This one is by the USDA and tracks food costs as a share of all household spending, across 155 countries. We have extracted their data to compare how New Zealand benchmarks against eleven other countries.
For food costs as a share of all household spending, this is what it shows.
New Zealand households spend about the same share of all spending as in the Netherlands and Norway, a lot less than in Japan, and a bit less than in France. But in most other much larger countries we spend more. The obvious exception is Ireland, but they are so closely integrated into their neighbour the UK and into the EU, it perhaps isn't a surprise that they piggyback scale advantages.
We often feel we are disadvantaged compared with Australia. However many readers probably thought is was more than this data shows.
An here is a comparison of what these households spend in dollar terms. In this case, it is USD.
Here our disadvantage isn't as much as you might assume. The issue is more that our household spending on other stuff (other than food) is less, mainly because we have lower incomes. However isolating the food aspect, we spend very similar amounts as households in Australia, Germany, France, the Netherlands - and less than in the US and Norway.
It is also interesting to observe that in most of these countries, food prices rose notably from 2024 to 2025 - but not in New Zealand.
It is just another perspective from an independent long-run source. Draw your own conclusions.
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