Food price index · daily nowcast
Food inflation today, not next month.
Stats NZ publishes food prices once a month, for the month before. We price the same basket every day from supermarket shelves, so you can see where the number is heading before it lands.
All food
Base 1000 · anchored to the latest official monthBy group
How it works, honestly
The basket
Stats NZ's Food Price Index has five groups and 145 representative items, each with a published expenditure weight. We can observe 130 of them in supermarkets; restaurant meals and takeaways are excluded and the weights are re-normalised. That's why this is a nowcast, not the official statistic.
The prices
Each basket item is matched to several products at each chain. Where possible that means the house brand and the leading brand. For chains that price by store we take the median across the country. A special counts for the item's price, and so does a club price: the cards are free and most shoppers carry one, so it is the price people actually pay. A multibuy counts too, at what each one costs in the set, whenever that is the cheapest way to buy it.
The maths
Every matched product is indexed to the level of its item on the day it joined, so products coming and going never jump the series. Items combine as a geometric mean; groups and the headline combine by the official weights. Products not seen for 14 days drop out.
The anchor
When Stats NZ publishes a month, our daily series is scaled so its average for that month equals the official level. Our movement, their level. Raw and anchored series are both in the open data.
Stats NZ: Food Price Index Consumers Price Index 2024 basket review Monthly releases