A block of butter used to cost the average New Zealand worker about seven minutes of pay. It now costs eleven. A kilogram of chicken breast used to cost half an hour. It now costs twenty minutes. Ten years of food prices have not simply made the weekly shop dearer across the board. They have split it in two.
The split shows up when the weighted average prices Stats NZ collects each month are set against what people actually earn. In the selected price indexes for July 2026, released on 17 August, a 500 gram block of salted butter averaged $8.43. In July 2016 it averaged $3.28, a rise of 157 percent. A dozen eggs went from $3.77 to $8.49, up 125 percent. A 600 gram loaf of white sliced bread went from $1.08 to $2.38, up 120 percent. A kilogram of kiwifruit, a fruit this country grows for a living, went from $2.10 to $5.36.
Wages did not keep up with any of that. Average ordinary time hourly earnings across all industries were $29.59 in the June 2016 quarter and $44.62 in the June 2026 quarter, according to the Quarterly Employment Survey published in the June 2026 labour market statistics. That is a gain of about 51 percent over the decade, or roughly a third of the increase in the price of butter.
Converting prices into working time makes the change easier to feel. On those average gross earnings, butter has gone from about seven minutes of work to about eleven and a half. Eggs have gone from about seven and a half minutes to about eleven and a half. A loaf of white bread has gone from a bit over two minutes to a bit over three. A kilogram of fresh fish, which now averages $49.62, has gone from just under an hour of work to more than an hour. Fish and chips for one has gone from about thirteen minutes to about fifteen.
Then there is the other half of the trolley, the part that rarely gets a headline. A kilogram of chicken breast averaged $14.44 in July 2016 and $14.80 in July 2026, a rise of 2.5 percent across ten years. In working time that is a fall from about twenty nine minutes to about twenty. Pork loin chops went from $15.84 to $16.71, which is thirty two minutes of work down to twenty two. A kilogram of onions costs almost exactly what it cost in 2016. Broccoli, avocados and lettuce are all cheaper in dollars than they were a decade ago, and lettuce has fallen 30 percent, from $8.17 a kilogram to $5.73, which in working time is a drop from about seventeen minutes to under eight. Flour, sugar and peanut butter have all become cheaper measured in hours worked.
The pattern is not random. Nearly everything at the painful end of the list is something New Zealand sells to the world. Butter, cheese, milk, lamb, beef and kiwifruit are export goods, and the price on a Kiwi shelf is anchored to what a buyer in Shanghai or Los Angeles will pay. Nearly everything at the cheaper end is something grown or raised here mainly for the domestic market, where competition and scale have done their work. Chicken and pork are produced almost entirely for New Zealanders. So are onions, lettuce and broccoli.
Westpac senior economist Satish Ranchhod made the same connection in an interview with RNZ published on Monday. “We have seen some pretty widespread increases in the cost of household essentials. That includes things like butter, milk and meat products, but those are also the same products that New Zealand produces,” he said. “We’ve seen strong demands, both onshore and offshore, and that’s one of the big factors that’s pushed up prices, not just here, but globally.”
Ranchhod said households were unlikely to have seen the end of it. “We think there are a couple of factors that are going to keep prices for a lot of those essential food items high for a while. In part, we’re still seeing strong demand for protein globally, so that is adding to the prices for a lot of dairy products, but also meat products.” He also pointed to costs further back down the chain. “We’re also seeing some big increases in production costs, especially in the food sector, where we’ve had big increases in fuel costs that are adding to on-farm operating costs. It’s also rippling through transportation and packaging, and other parts of the supply chain.” Diesel at the pump has been climbing again, as our fuel price tracker shows.
He argued there was a second side to the same coin for parts of the country. “These prices are certainly adding to the pressure on a lot of households’ finances when they go through the checkout, but the other side of that is, if you are in these more rurally focused areas like Canterbury, Southland and Otago, those strong export earnings in the commodity sector are flowing through to higher incomes, spending and confidence more generally.”
Infometrics principal economist Brad Olsen told RNZ that global appetite for protein was doing much of the work. “Demand from the US is still strong because of GLP-1s. You’re seeing that move across the world, where people are not eating nearly as much, but when they eat, it needs to be quite nutrient dense and protein dense, so they’ve got enough to rebuild muscles,” he said. “That’s definitely keeping prices elevated and that comes through to New Zealand, because we’re in that global marketplace.”
Simplicity chief economist Shamubeel Eaqub warned against reading slower inflation as relief. “The rate of growth might slow, but it will still be growing. Slowing inflation rates don’t actually mean anything to somebody who’s paying still a ton of money for the basics,” he said. The foods rising fastest, he said, were the ordinary ones. “It’s making a sandwich, cooking a roast or whatever.”
Annual food price inflation did fall to 1.9 percent in the year to July 2026, the slowest since 2024, and prices rose just 0.1 percent between June and July. But a slower rate of increase sits on top of a decade that has already happened. Butter is not going back to $3.28.
Two caveats belong on the working time figures. Average hourly earnings are gross, before tax, so the real number of minutes at the till is higher for everyone. And an average is pulled up by high earners, which means a worker on or near the minimum wage has seen the butter and eggs side of the ledger get worse than these numbers suggest, and has gained less from cheaper chicken than the average implies.
Still, the shape of the decade is clear enough. If your household eats a lot of chicken, pork, onions and whatever salad is in season, the last ten years have been survivable. If it runs on butter, cheese, eggs, red meat and fish, it has not. That is not a story about supermarket margins alone, and it will not be fixed by a slower inflation rate. It is a story about a small country eating food that the rest of the world has decided it wants too.
Has your weekly shop split the same way, or have you swapped what you buy to keep the total down? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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