NYC NOW - Tracking The Cost of Groceries Across NYC

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

New Yorkers are feeling the pinch as grocery prices climb and changes to SNAP eligibility rules loom. Janae talks to WNYC reporters Karen Yi and Joe Hong about their six-month project tracking food affordability across the five boroughs, and tips for stretching your dollar at checkout.

Welcome to NYC Now. I'm Jenae Pierre. Have you heard anything about the free grocery store pop-ups happening around New York City these days? It's becoming more and more obvious that many New Yorkers are dealing with food insecurity, along with an increase in grocery prices. On today's episode, we'll get a better understanding of why groceries cost what they do and ways to stretch your dollars. But first, here's what's happening around the city. Nurses at Mount Sinai and Montefiure have reached tentative agreements that could bring them back to work after nearly a month on the picket line. The New York State Nurses Association says the contracts include a salary boost of 12% over three years, along with new staffing gains. The union announced the tentative deals Monday morning.

But nurses must vote on whether to approve the tentative agreements before they can return to work. A Montefiore spokesperson confirmed the news. Mount Sinai did not respond to a request for comment. Nurses on strike at New York Presbyterian are still negotiating with hospital officials. A federal judge in Manhattan has ordered the Trump administration to resume funding for the Gateway Tunnel Project, after work on the Hudson River rail tunnels halted Friday when the project ran out of money. The Trump administration has been withholding congressionally approved funding for the commuter train tunnel since October. New York Congressman Mike Lawler says getting the Gateway Tunnel Project going is more important than the name of a station.

The Republicans' comments follow reports that President Trump has offered to unfreeze federal funding for the project if Democrats agreed to rename Penn Station and Washington-Dulles International Airport after him. At the end of the day, to me, I really could care less what the name of a building is, a critical infrastructure project is. I care that it gets done. And ultimately, from my vantage point, you know, work it out. Federal funding for the Gateway Tunnel Project was secured years ago. But despite Friday's ruling, it's still not clear when the Trump administration will resume the payments. Congrats to NYU's women's basketball team for making history over the weekend.

The violence won their 82nd game in a row, setting a new national record for Division III teams. They beat Carnegie Mellon 69 to 58. NYU is undefeated this season and chasing a third straight national title. Still ahead, a couple of my colleagues have been tracking grocery prices across the city. We'll discuss their findings after a quick break. New York has been getting a lot of attention lately for free grocery giveaways, pop-ups and promotions tied to companies like Kalshi and Polly Market. They grab headlines, but they don't last very long.

Underneath that is a much bigger reality. Grocery prices in New York aren't random. They're shaped by where stores by their food, how it gets delivered, what neighborhoods can support which kinds of stores, and who has leverage in that process. For more than a million New Yorkers dealing with food insecurity, that means the same groceries can cost very different amounts

depending on where you live and where you shop. To understand why WMYC reporters Karen Y, and Joe Hong spent six months tracking grocery prices across the city, comparing stores, neighborhoods, and supply chains to see what actually drives the cost of food here. They join me now. So it's safe to say that this project has changed you. Oh, yeah, I'm a much better shopper. My mother would be proud.

Yeah. What about you, Joe? No, definitely. I think, like, I used to be the one-stop shopper just out of convenience, like, just go to Trader Joe's. but now I go to like a couple grocery stores that I'll check for sales. And it ends up being way cheaper than if I had just done Trader Joe's. Yeah. And I think interestingly enough, like that's what really launched this project.

I do a lot around affordability. And I was really curious to understand how people receiving Snap shop, right? And in many cases, it's quite a privilege, I think, to be able to go to one store every week, gather your supplies, and then do it again next week. But I think that's not the reality for a lot of people. And for snapshoters, they have to be super conscious of where they're spending their dollars and making sure that it's sort of finding a way to stretch that dollar. And they've always had to think this way.

And I think with food prices going up, more and more of us are having to think this way. Yeah, here we are. So we chose 20 stores, but we also wanted to include this element of like, hey, we're just like two local reporters who are schlepping around the city. And we can tell you what it feels like to go to. a grocery store in East Harlem and then within a couple hours like we're in flushing at like an Asian grocery store that feels totally different to be in like the sensory experience of being in that store is different 149 the pound and then 249 bundle last time yeah let's stick to the bundle 249 for the bundle oh actually there's no one over there oh yeah oh wait we just this whole but those are still cheaper the two oh no 140 It was a lot of work and we went all over the five boroughs. We went to Staten Island, the Bronx,

we went by car, we went walking, we took the train. And so I think what Joe and I wanted to bring to this is sort of something new, right? And I think the newness of this grocery tracker is that we were physically there every month, rain, snow, whatever it was, and we experienced all the seasons. And we're picking up the products, talking to groceries along the way, talking to shoppers along the way, listening to the different kinds of music and the different languages around us. We wanted to tell you, hey, what does this mean? Or is it confusing? And maybe it means a couple different things.

And at the end of the day, well, can you as a consumer as a shopper learn from it, right? Like, give me something useful here. All right. So how did you two decide what stores to visit and what items to check? In each borough, we chose two neighborhoods, one that was more low income and one that was more affluent. For determining sort of like what a low-income neighborhood is, we used a combination of child poverty data and bodega to grocery store ratios that we found in our research. How does that work? Brooklyn is a good example.

We chose two neighborhoods Park Slope and Brownsville. Park Slope has, I think, a little less than one in ten kids live in poverty compared to Brownsville, where a majority of kids are consistent. that are living in poverty. And then for the bodega to grocery store ratio, if a neighborhood has more bodegas and grocery stores, it illustrates this lack of access to food, right? So was it East Tremont in the Bronx? Yeah, East Tremont.

They had a one to 37. Right, so one grocery store for every 37 bodegas. And this is old data. And it was just, it was a pretty standout statistic. So that was one of the neighborhoods we picked in the Bronx. and then Riverdale was sort of on the other spectrum of that. Yeah, not necessarily a food desert, but certainly an area that could use a grocery store for fresh foods.

You mentioned picking up products. Can you guys tell me how you even came up with what products to check? Yeah, so we did some preliminary research on the types of groceries that are most commonly purchased in the United States, the types of groceries that fluctuate most in price typically. We wanted to get a mix of those different types of products. So we chose 11 items, everything from like avocados and carrots, apples, and bananas. For me, we did ground beef and chicken breast.

And then we did like sort of the staples, like canned black beans and rice. So you all mentioned happening around from East Harlem all the way to Jim. Marr, the Asian store, and Flushing. What did you learn about the city's grocery system along the way? We learned a lot. I wish we had an easy answer about what is the one thing that determines what we pay at checkout when we pick up a jar of mayonnaise or a bag of tomatoes. But it wasn't so simple, right? There's all of these factors that go into what we call the supply chain.

Roasters are kind of just the middlemen, right? And there's actually a lot of middlemen along the way that sort of determine prices that ultimately trickle down to the consumer. And there's also a lot of these like global external factors about, you know, weather, drought, sometimes Mexican cartels, right? Sort of taking over the avocado trade. So all of these things that happen at the grower and distribution at the beginning that then wholesalers have to account for when they get their cut that then pass down to the local grocer that then eventually get passed down to you. And to understand what the supply chain really means, Joe and I decided to kind of trace that back a little bit. And we discussed.

that there is a distribution, one of the largest in the world, right here in the five boroughs in the Bronx. It's called Hunts Point. And we visited Hunts Point, which is considered a spot market. And that's where we met Dan Sparell. He is a wholesaler at Pan-Holetic Foods. And he sort of explained the ecosystem and why sometimes your fruits and your veggies might be cheaper at your quarter-reporting that. I'm annoying to go shopping with because I'm looking at this and be like, oh, I know the guy that sells velvet. And it's in key food or King Cullen or what a wall down or whatever. And I'm like, oh, I'm not buying that that guy's an asshole. But the retail markup is interesting. I'm always doing the math in my head. And I'm like, oh, wow, you know,

avocado prices didn't come down. Meanwhile, here, they're dirty cheap. Direct correlation between wholesale pricing and supermarket pricing. When I say supermarkets, I mean more than bigger chains. Smaller mom and pop supermarket in the neighborhoods in Brooklyn. They're going to be very susceptible to these. One day they have it, one day they don't. They can adjust quicker. And that guy can make a decision. You know what, it's too high.

I don't want it this week. But then what are you going to tell? Two words kept popping up in your reporting that I'd like to talk about spot market. Can you tell us a bit about that? Yeah. And so I was talking earlier about the supply chain. We wanted to understand what that actually means for New York City. New York City is actually a very unique place for grocery stores

because unlike the rest of the country, right, or Walmart or Wegmans is kind of like the only game in town. No grocery company owns a huge share of the stores here, right? No grocer owns more than 10% of the share. So there's a lot of competition. And you would think that that would make prices better, but really it doesn't because there's all these other factors in New York. It's just really expensive to do business here.

And so we were trying to get, say, an avocado and kind of pull the string and be like, how does this avocado get to your grocery store in New York City? And some of the avocados, more than half, are coming from a distribution center called Hunts Point. And they truck in food, you know, from all over the world. And they sort of have it lined up and professional buyers come. Maybe your local bodega comes. And they buy whatever fruits and vegetables look good or on sale. And that's what's called a spot market.

Sort of, you know, there's a lot of price negotiation on the spot. This is a spot market. So you're buying on the spot. So you're susceptible to price increases and price decreases. The bigger chain stores will have contract pricing where they're locked in at a price. And so I think that sort of explains a little bit why sometimes that corner bodega that you walk by with the fruits on the sidewalk has $2.99 or $1.99 raspberries where you get it at your food town for $6.99 and they're not organic, right? I think that sort of explains a little bit of the price difference because it really depends on where people get it, the deal they can strike. that idea of the spot market was, I think, really interesting to sort of inform the prices and the price variations we were seeing.

So, Joe, lots of factors go into grocery pricing, right? And considering what Karen just told us, shouldn't all of that make prices cheaper in New York City? You would think so, but no. New York City groceries are typically more expensive. And that's because rents are so high. And there's transportation fees for getting into the city. There's the high labor cost. And business insurance is a wild thing that we learned about.

We talked to one grocery store owner. He owns two of the Jubilee markets. There's one in the financial district and one in Greenpoint Brooklyn. And the one in Greenpoint Brooklyn is a little more accessible. The one in the financial district, it's, you know, next to all these, like, smaller streets. like cobblestone streets, and he said, it's so hard for the delivery trucks to deliver the product because the streets are so small,

and the business insurance is like hundreds of thousand dollars more expensive every year for that location. So all of that is just going to ramp up prices. The one takeaway from this project is also learning about how grocers are also struggling with rent and space in New York City, just like us. There's this one grocer on San Island, Stefan Jones, who we regularly visit. And his store is tiny.

It was probably the tiniest store we saw. It was in a lower income neighborhood on San Island. And he was saying, look, I don't even have a basement here. Right. So I can't buy too many cases of one item. So if something is a good deal, he can't buy more than six cases because he has nowhere to put it. Like also Coca-Cola, I just got a delivery in for Coca-Cola. Again, all of this goes to the shelf.

I don't have no backstock. I have no back warming up. So everything that fits, it fits on the shelf. because I had no way to put it. I have no basement. I have no storage. So it makes it easier for us, you know. So the way those stores, traditionally in lower income neighborhoods,

maybe with less storage, maybe they don't have sort of their own warehouse like Whole Foods or their own distributor contracts like Whole Foods, they rely on volume. They got to get stuff in and out, in and out, and sort of are making a couple cents here and there. And that's how they make their profit. But it is interesting sort of like how storage and space

really sort of limit what a grocer can do and ultimately the price that you're paying as a customer. Yeah. I want to get back to the supply and demand of all of this. We mentioned the avocado earlier, and that's something that's always on my grocery list. But unfortunately, like, I've been seeing avocados for like $3. And that's wild to me. Can you all tell me about your reporting and how you've seen avocados fluctuate? Yeah. The avocado is a very emotional fruit. I feel like we were noticing. these wild prices pretty early on. And we were asking shoppers, and everybody had sort of that reaction, like shopper Blue Carter. She's a shopper in East Harlem about how she sort of changed her diet because her daughter,

I think it was her daughter, really loves the avocado. And she's always like, are you sure you want me to buy this? Because maybe you'll throw it away and it's, you know, $3 for one pop. Oh my God, the avocado? Please, it used to be a couple cents. Now it's so expensive. That avocado is ridiculous. I tell you that right now.

My daughter loves avocado and I'm just like, you sure? You want this? Are you positive? Like, can we just grow our own at this point? Like, that's the goal. That's the goal. Like, financial freedom, you know? So, yeah, the avocado is crazy.

We saw prices go as low as, like, a quarter for an avocado at J-Mart to, like, like, you said, like $3 for an avocado. It sounds like I need to be at J-Mart. Yeah. Yeah, and then there's like the whole Super Bowl effect, right, which is people love to eat guacamole at these Super Bowl parties. And you see demand go up and everyone from our friend Dan at Hunts Point to your local grocer is going to see those prices go up. So Dan Sparrell, the wholesaler at Penn Hellenic Foods, explained it this way. Mexico doesn't care that we have it in Super Bowl.

They're not picking extra because New York's having a Super Bowl. but there'll be extra demand here for sure. Now, if the supply down in Mexico is short, then yes, the price will go up. We need our guac. Yeah, yeah. And he is expecting a price spike around this time of year. So like Joe is saying, a lot of it does have to do with supply, but grocers do have a little bit of discretion here.

And so maybe grocers in certain communities know, listen, avocado is a must have in our neighborhood. We cannot jack the price that much. We heard from grocers that they're kind of constantly making these calculations about whether maybe an item, we're just going to lose money on it because we've got to keep our customers coming back to our store. And if they perceive us to be expensive, they're going to go elsewhere. Right? It's a very competitive market. And so like I said earlier, it is kind of this domino effect, but then it gets a little bit muddy, right? Because you

have so many players in the market making all these decisions. And so another grocer may say, Mexico's not picking more avocados. We're going to jack up the price because maybe that's not an item that maybe their customers are really demanding. Or maybe that's an item they know people will pay for because New Yorkers love their avocado. And ground beef is another example of that. The average price for a pound within our 20 stores went up from $5.80 to $6.60 to $0.60, almost a dollar. That's a big jump. And a lot of that was because in the regions where ranchers raise beef cattle,

there was a lot of drought, right? So that led to a smaller supply of beef that cranked up prices. So it's a real domino effect, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. And remember, everyone is sort of taking a cut in their share. This isn't a very lucrative business, right? In many cases, grocers are earning one to two percent profit and barely sort of keeping their doors open. For low-income neighborhoods, that profit can be even less than 1%. You know, they tend to be the face, right? There are other people we see we're mad at our grocery price. But if you're kind of trade it back, right? Wholesalers are also taking their cut. Everyone's sort of taking their cut to sort of make this business work, but they're all sort of subject to everything that goes on, right?

Whether it's tariffs, whether it's the weather, whether it's a drought. And on our side, too, right? Like what we demand, whether we now have a new crave for whatever novelty item or we all need our guacamole or our avocado toast, ground beef patties, hamburgers, whatever it is, right? So it's a lot of things that are sort of putting pressure on this very delicate ecosystem. Yeah. You know, I recall during the holidays, when the feds froze SNAP benefits for most people receiving those benefits, I'm just wondering what that freeze meant for grocery stores and for prices during that time. Yeah, I'm glad we were doing this project when the SNAP freeze happened because a lot of the reporting and a lot of the focus was on people who are receiving SNAP dollars, right? And rightfully so. They are the ones that were harmed when there was a freeze on. their benefits. But SNAP dollars essentially is money people use to shop at the stores, right? Grocery stores are the primary beneficiary of this federal program. And we were out in neighborhoods

where they were already freezing orders, right? They were ordering less food because they were predicting that their shoppers wouldn't be able to afford their groceries because some of these stores, 50% up to 80% of their revenue relies on SNAP. And so if you're pulling the rug on this massive revenue source. There's no way you can replace that. And so the grocer I mentioned before on San Island's Stefan Jones, he said they actually had to throw away product because it wasn't selling. No problem. You have to throw away a lot of meat. Yeah, some of the meat did go bad. And they had to throw it away because there was no business. I heard big time. Not only us, as far as it's like business, but the community as a whole. You can see people that really needed

food. Some people that, like, I know that come in here all the time, it was like, oh, thank God, they're trying to push them. I didn't have no food for my kids to feed them and stuff like that. I'm like, wow, really? It was rough, right? It was really hard for people because usually you get your SNAP benefits and you're there at the store at the beginning of the month. And if you don't have that, you know, sales sort of dipped at the beginning of the month for these grocery stores. Yeah. Fortunately, though, this disruption was just temporary. We know that SNAP benefits later resumed, but those work rules, they changed, right, Karen? Right. So the snap freeze in a way, we could see it as a window of what's to come, right? And, you know, SNAP is food benefits. And for a

long time, New York has had a waiver, right? If you receive SNAP, they don't require people to prove or show documentation that they are working or in school, right? The federal administration changed that. And so now all of these people on SNAP are going to have to prove and show documentation that they're working at least 80 hours a month, yes. And I think there's a lot of concern that people won't be able to meet these work rules and then will be permanently kicked off the program, right? Or sort of be limited in how many benefits they'll be able to receive. And so grocers are also bracing for that.

We were actually talking to them about the impact of SNAP long term, and then we saw sort of this short-term freeze, right? So all of the concerns and everything Joe talked about, grocers having to cut back on staff, grocers having to offer maybe less selection on products, grocers may be having to throw away food. Like all of those concerns still exist. It's just going to happen over a prolonged period of time.

I mean, the work rules have already kicked in, and we're going to start seeing people get kicked off their benefits as soon as March. Yeah. And honestly, you know, now that I'm understanding this reporting and better understanding what's going on at grocery stores, I've also seen this play out at my local bodega, you know, throwing away bananas and fruits that have not been purchased yet. Right.

There is a lot of food. waste because like I mentioned, a lot of these stores and bodegas, they make their profit. They survive in the community by volume of sales, right? Everyone's sort of picking up a banana or two on their way to work, picking up a gallon of milk on the way to school. And if those little purchases aren't happening, right, those add up. Yeah. So I need to know what's the heck here? What's the secret? Where's the cheapest basket of items that you found? What store should I be shopping at, basically? The biggest takeaway is that the days of one-stop shopping. are over. Like you have to make multiple stops. There are sales that you got to sort of map out,

figure out what you want to buy where. We keep going back to this thing, but it's really, really the takeaway, right? I think you just have to be a lot more mindful at the store, right? You know, grocery stores have devised this food math, right, to make it all work. And so maybe your store is charging you more for what they consider a premium item, right? Maybe something that's organic, maybe something that's harder to get, right? And the surcharge on that is much more than maybe what they pay because that's how they're making their profit, right? Stores are generally not going to make their profit off of basic staples like milk, beans, and rice. Like the avocado, right? The avocado, maybe you can get them cheaper at all these. Maybe you can get them cheaper at

J-Mart, right? And so I think you have to sort of be just a smarter consumer, right? Because if everybody on the supply line is able to make calculations and negotiations and bargains on what they're buying, so should you. Joe? Yeah, I think the slogan for this project has been grocery prices are more art than science. And I think going into this, I expected grocery prices to be set like very algorithmically, almost like prices on Amazon or something. But grocery store owners are really trying to like game the system of like, oh, this thing is selling well. Does it mean I can just raise prices? Like, no, that's not always the case. They're trying to make relationships with their customers, you know?

A version of that is happening at every level of the supply chain, right? Like even at Hunt's point, wholesalers will take a small loss if that means maintaining a long-term relationship with a buyer. Yeah. And so when I learned that grocery stores are maybe making like 1% margins, like it kind of just makes me feel like, oh, we're kind of all on this together. And everyone's struggling. Yeah, yeah.

And I think the other thing is talk to your local grocer, you know, maybe find out, hey, what day of the week do you get your produce? And then maybe ask them what days of the week is a good day to come back because maybe it's going bad, right? And you can get it on a sale because they're trying to get rid of their softer avocados, right? And so I think, again, sort of consider your grocer as part of your community and have that conversation with them too. We'll do. That's WMYC's Karen Yee and Joe Hong. Thanks, you too. Thanks, Jeney.

you. And thank you for listening to NYC Now. I'm Jenae Pierre. See you soon.