US Grocery Prices Rose 2.9% in April 2026, Matching Recent Trends as Egg Prices Fall Sharply

U.S. 9 percent compared with April 2025, the highest year-over-year increase since August 2023, according to Labor Department figures released on Tuesday, May 13, 2026. 2 percent in the year ending April 2026.

U.S. cities paid at retail stores for meat, bread, milk, produce and other grocery staples. 8 percent more for meat.

5 percent. 8 percent less.

U.S. Department of Agriculture. Consumer prices for tomatoes rose 40 percent in the 12 months before April 2026 after the Trump administration imposed a 17 percent duty on fresh tomatoes imported from Mexico in July 2025.

U.S. has been one of many factors pushing up beef prices. U.S. gasoline price per gallon was up 61 percent from a year earlier, according to AAA.

U.S. agricultural products. The meat, produce and dry goods vendors that supply Sparrow Market in Ann Arbor, Michigan, added fuel surcharges to their deliveries in recent weeks before May 13, 2026.

Wholesale prices for meat, produce and some other products have gone up, according to Raymond Campise of Sparrow Market. “For independent markets operating on narrow margins, even small increases can have a major impact,” Campise said. Higher costs to produce, process, store and transport food can take three to six months to show up on supermarket shelves.

“Most of what we’re seeing now in the food price chain probably predates the conflict,” Ken Foster, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University, said. U.S. shrimpers.

U.S. shrimpers supply only 6 percent of the shrimp that Americans consume, according to the Southern Shrimp Alliance. Some boats have not left the dock this spring because they cannot catch enough shrimp to compensate for the cost of diesel.

Part of April’s 5 percent annual increase in prices for nonalcoholic beverages may be due to petroleum derivatives used in plastic bottles. Around 30 percent of the world’s fertilizer travels through the Strait of Hormuz. U.S.

Farmers already had fertilizer supplies in place before the war began, according to Ken Foster. “I expect the Iran conflict to impact the coming years’ food prices through a couple of channels. One, the energy costs and transportation handling.

The other would be through packaging costs,” Foster said.