Food shoppers have just gotten a bit of good news on the food price front. Gary Crawford has more in this report.

PARTICIPANTS: Gary Crawford and USDA economist, Megan Sweitzer

Transcript

For the last few months, grocery store food prices... ...have been increasing at a rate lower than the overall rate of inflation.

And in May, they didn't increase at all, zero inflation.

This from the Consumer Price Index.

Agriculture Department economist Megan Schweitzer says this is just the latest evidence that inflation is cooling down.

So this is the second time in the past three months that grocery prices have had no growth.

And overall, over the past four months, grocery prices have only risen by 0.2 percent in total.

So really, grocery prices have been pretty flat over the past four months.

With grocery store food prices only averaging 1 percent higher than this time one year ago.

Reasons?

Megan says, first, for the food sector in general, there's...

Less supply chain pressure.

There's a good supply of goods.

You see some retailers announcing price cuts, which puts pressure on other retailers.

And so that's probably in response to some softening consumer demand after the price increases that consumers have faced over the past few years.

And so some retailers are trying to create more demand by lowering prices, which makes for an increasingly consumer-friendly food price situation.

Of course, when we talk about zero food price inflation for May, that is an average of all foods.

Megan says prices for some foods continue to climb, particularly meat products.

Prices rose the most over the month for pork by 1.4 percent.

And so pork was the only category to actually decline in price last year in 2023.

So we're seeing that trend start to reverse a bit and some moderate growth in pork prices due to higher demand this year compared to last year.

Likewise for beef.

Beef prices increased by 0.3 percent in May, so lower than the increase in pork prices.

But beef prices have shown the highest growth over the year.

Beef prices are at 5.7 percent from May of 2023.

So it looks like that 4th of July hamburger may cost us a little more than last year.

And what about poultry?

Poultry has shown slower growth.

Prices rose by 0.4 percent in May, and poultry prices are only up 1.2 percent over the year since last May, which is below its long-term average.

Now beyond meat, Megan says prices for many food categories last month did not increase at all.

And in fact...

There are three food categories where prices are lower than they were a year ago.

Yes, we're paying less for milk and dairy products, for fresh fruit, and also fish and seafood.

Gary Crawford for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.