Eggs are how much? News outlets launch grocery price trackers

A three-pound bag of Wyman’s frozen wild blueberries. A pound of salmon. A dozen large brown eggs.

Each month, students at the University of Southern Maine check the prices of these items, and more, at four grocery stores across the state: The Whole Foods in Portland, the Shaw’s in Bangor, the Walmart in Farmington, and the Hannaford in Caribou.

It’s all for the Maine Public Price Index, an initiative that Maine Public Radio launched with the University of Southern Maine at the beginning of this year. The index, which tracks heat, gas, and rent prices in addition to groceries, is intended to help Maine Public’s audience understand inflation in the state (and maybe find the lowest prices on eggs, too).

Voters in the 2024 U.S. election ranked the cost of living, the economy, and inflation as the most important issues they faced, and Donald Trump campaigned on lowering grocery prices. After the election, I wrote about how we need a Wirecutter for groceries — and how prices at the supermarket represent a unique opportunity for news organizations to connect with people who might not read them otherwise.

Since Trump took office in January 25, grocery prices have only gone up, and Trump’s recently announced tariffs could cause prices of some foods to skyrocket.

News outlets large and small, national and local, are trying to help readers understand the fallout. Some, like CBS, CNN, and the Chicago Tribune, are tracking grocery prices nationally, relying on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Others, like WRAL News in Raleigh and ABC 15 in Phoenix, are also telling readers which stores to hit for the best deals on milk and bread, broccoli and bacon.

And a few outlets are going deeper, providing more extensive and frequent reporting and partnering with market research firms for the data or collecting it themselves. Here are three interesting initiatives I’ve noticed in recent weeks.

The Boston Globe

The Boston Globe has been tracking the price of grocery staples like toilet paper, eggs, and ground coffee in the Boston area since last August. It also has a handy feature that lets you see how different categories of groceries across different cities are changing each week and how much they’ve changed in total since 2019.

“We were writing repeatedly about rising prices, and wanted to standardize the way we collected and shared information,” Yoohun Jung, the Globe’s data editor, told me.

The Globe gets its grocery data from market research firm Datasembly, which collects the pricing information weekly. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, by contrast, releases food price data every month. Datasembly’s categories are also more specific than those from BLS and offer “access to information about specific products,” said Kirkland An, Globe newsroom developer.

Tracking the data over time has also allowed the Globe’s team to be aware of particularly newsworthy changes or trends in the prices of particular products, which inspires one-off stories like this one on Boston egg prices.

Maine Public

On December 5, 2024, Maine Public posted a request on its social media channels:

Maine Public got more than 400 responses in just a few days. (Some were very specific: “How about a cup of reg coffee 16 oz at Dunkin; a bag of King Arthur white flour from Hannafords; and Tide pods laundry detergent pack, original scent, 57-count from Wal Mart?”) Sorted onto a spreadsheet, “we could see that people were most concerned about grocery items, housing, utility, and some health care costs,” Irwin Gratz, host and producer of Maine Public’s Morning Edition, told me. “Of these we were most interested in those that were most volatile and [thus] likely to serve as an early indicator of where prices might be going” — groceries, gas and heating fuel, and housing, especially rent.

Maine Public enlisted the help of Michael Cauvel, associate professor of economics at the University of Southern Maine, and his students to help track grocery prices and interpret the data. The result is the Maine Public Price Index.

Maine Public receives the raw data from Cauvel’s students at the end of each month and hooks it to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ release of the Consumer Price Index a couple weeks later. It’s published stories for the months of February and March (“Egg prices stopped climbing in Maine, but other items like meat, milk, and broccoli helped nudge the index 1.3% percent higher”), and you can expect its next story in mid-May.

The Washington Post

The Post is tracking how food prices have changed since Trump’s inauguration. Instead of presenting the changes in prices of individual items, it’s aggregating them into groups — like fast food meals, barbecue, breakfast, and BLTs.

“Over the course of the campaign, we’d noticed how Trump picked out specific examples of the sorts of things for which people were paying more: bacon, lettuce, tomato,” said Post columnist Philip Bump. “Because he’d emphasized price increases so frequently and given examples of those increases, it seemed natural to keep an eye on how those prices might change during his presidency.”

The Post gets its data from market research firm Numerator, which it prefers to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data for a few reasons. First, Numerator’s data comes out daily rather than monthly, allowing for more frequent updates. Second, it allows for tracking predetermined “baskets” of items: This week, for instance, you can see that the price of a breakfast of eggs, avocado toast, Greek yogurt, coffee, and orange juice is up 4% since Trump’s inauguration and 53% since January 2020.

There is another reason for not relying on the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the team said. At start of the project back in January, they were concerned about the reliability and consistency of federal data; Trump frequently calls federal economic data fake. In February, Elon Musk’s DOGE targeted BLS, raising concerns that U.S. government data could become unreliable or could be manipulated.

The Post’s reaction from readers has generally been positive. “One reader commented that this tracker showed exactly why he voted for Trump before,” said Youyou Zhou, graphics reporter at the Post’s Opinion desk, “and the continued pain — caused by inflation — that he’s still experiencing.”