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Cost of eating at home rose 6% in 2021

An Ohio State professor said meat prices rose about 7% in 2021.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — If you're planning on hosting a Super Bowl party, it will most likely cost you more than years past, as you've probably noticed your grocery bill on the rise.

Dan Varga is the owner of the Hungarian Butcher, which has been open since November. Varga says when he buys beef and pork, it can get pretty pricey.

“Seeing prices on my invoice that I would pay the grocery store a couple years ago and now having double that and charged to the public, it's a little unnerving honestly,” Varga said.

“The meat category is where there's a lot of attention…we’ve seen prices in 2021 up in the order of 7%, in terms of price increases,” said Dr. Zoe Plakias, an assistant professor at the Ohio State University.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says over the course of 2021, the cost of eating at home went up by more than 6%.

“Usually food retailers and processors they are trying to predict what we are going to buy and they're trying to make sure they have what we want, when we want, and where we want it, now the pandemic threw all those predictions out the window,” said Dr. Zoe Plakias.

But, she says, the hike in cost should taper out over the course of this year; she's expecting about a 3% rate of inflation instead of close to 7.

“As our kind of spending patterns stabilize, as consumers, to kind of a predictable pattern that we’ll start to see stabilization of those prices because we won't be seeing maybe growth in demand we will just be kind of seeing a stable level of demand,” she said.

Plakias says one of the questions she's asked frequently is why some shelves are bare? She says it's not because we're running out of food, she says it's because there are challenges to the supply chain.

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