AFBF Thanksgiving Survey Shows 2024 Holiday Dinner Slightly Less Expensive

Smith: The American Farm Bureau Federation sent out volunteer shoppers to calculate the cost of a typical Thanksgiving Day meal for ten people. Bernt Nelson, an economist for AFBF, talks about what they found.

Nelson: So, according to our volunteer shoppers, the average cost of a Thanksgiving meal for 10 people is $58.08 or about $5.80 a person. This is about five percent lower than last year, but it's almost 20 percent higher than just five years ago. So, even though we've had two years' decline in prices, this doesn't erase the dramatic increases that we saw that led to record high prices in 2022.

Smith: He says shoppers will see increases in the price of several items.

Nelson: The biggest increases were kind of in some of the big ticket items, so we have foods like stuffing and dinner rolls, and these went up by about eight percent. The biggest price increase was in the price of cranberries. So, this was up 12 percent this year, and something to keep in mind is that cranberries saw a significant decrease last year, around an 18 percent drop in prices. According to our survey, this year's price increase puts cranberries closer to the historic norms.

Smith: Nelson says this year's basket of goods reflects the overall economy.

Nelson: While inflation has slowed down, it really hasn't slowed down enough to bring costs back down to these pre-pandemic levels. So it's really important to remember that our farmers and ranchers, like our consumers, are also dealing with inflation, so the cost of supplies to grow food has gone up, while USDA predicts that net farm income is going to be down nearly 25 percent compared to just two years ago.

Smith: For more information, go to fb.org. Chad Smith, Washington.