Category
What 13 staple grocery items families actually buy have cost over 45 years, vs. the official CPI.
Food prices, the apple-to-apples story. Of the ten buckets in the Reality Index, food at home is the bucket where the official CPI does best. Industrial-scale agriculture has held food retail prices roughly in line with overall inflation over 45 years — the food composite grew 3.03× versus CPI's 3.91×.
The qualification: this is true in dollar terms only. The eggs of 2025 are not the eggs of 1980. See what Reality Index doesn't measure for the reverse-hedonics argument on industrial food.
Each card below links to the full chart page for that item — including retail dollar series, BLS CPI subindex for that category, and the long-history backstop where available. Multiples shown are 1980-anchored unless the underlying data series doesn't extend that far back.
Eggs
per dozen
Ground beef
per lb
Chicken breast
per lb
Whole milk
per gallon
Cheese (cheddar)
per lb
White bread
per lb
Flour
per lb
Pasta
per lb
Coffee
per lb
Bananas
per lb
Tomatoes
per lb
Potatoes
per lb
Breakfast cereal
BLS CPI subindex
Composite construction. Equal-weighted average of 13 individual food items: eggs, ground beef, chicken breast, whole milk, cheese, white bread, flour, pasta, coffee, bananas, tomatoes, potatoes, and breakfast cereal. Each item is indexed to its 1980 dollar price (or BLS subindex equivalent where dollar data starts after 1980, chained backward via the relevant CPI subindex). The composite is then a simple average of these indexes.
Why equal-weighted, not basket-weighted. For the category page we use equal weights to show what each item has done. For the headline Reality Index rate, we use BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey weights within the groceries bucket (which gives larger weight to items families spend more on, like meat, dairy, and bread).
Industrial agriculture caveat. The same retail item across decades may have different real-world quality. Industrial egg production, mass-produced broiler chicken, and grain-finished feedlot beef are different goods from their 1980 counterparts. The dollar prices have tracked CPI. The actual product has shifted. See what we don't measure.