A federal auditor released a report last week that put the levels of inflation seen at Dallas-Fort Worth grocers among the highest in the nation last year.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) filed a report on March 28, revealing the findings of its investigation into the causes of rising inflation, particularly in terms of the supply chain.
GAO leveraged data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Labor Statistics to track retail food price trends from 2013 to 2022.
Special attention was paid to what the report called “the largest annual percentage increase in food prices since the 1980s” between August 2021 and August 2022.
It revealed that among the 17 major metropolitan areas tracked by the BLS, DFW saw the second-highest hike in grocery prices, which increased by 14.03% in 2022.
Only Detroit, which was a 14.49% increase, was higher. Philadelphia came in third with 13.63%, and Houston followed with 12.57%.
Other major cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Boston hovered closer to 10%.
In fact, the report showed that all of the 17 cities experienced double-digit percentage increases in 2022, except for Fort Lauderdale-Miami and the urban core of Hawaii.
From 2013 to 2022, retail food prices in DFW rose by an average of 2% per year. Yet they surged by 11% between 2021 and 2022.
The fallout can be felt throughout the region now. Maintaining the same level of comfort will cost the residents of North Texas a lot more in 2023 than it did last year.
GAO interviewed officials from the USDA to better understand the reasons behind the 2021-2022 nationwide surge in food prices.
Portions of each dollar spent on food go to cover a different cost incurred by one of the multiple industries involved in producing and moving food along the food supply chain, the report explained.
Food processing takes the largest slice of every dollar at 24.6 cents. Major grocery retailers take the next largest share at 19.9 cents on every dollar. Wholesalers take 14.7 cents, farms receive 14.1 cents, transportation gets 5 cents, and so on.
Disruptions such as COVID-19 and the avian flu that led to higher costs encountered at different levels of the food supply chain were rolled over all the way to the grocer’s shelf.
During the USDA interviews, GAO also inquired about some of the factors leading to the variable increases seen across the different metro areas.
The variations were attributed to the different costs retailers faced in the food supply chain.
These costs related to transportation, labor, and rent, which vary by locale, were transferred to the consumer through food price increases.
In the case of DFW, the robustness of the economy and the growth in the local population have played a role in high grocery prices, per The Dallas Morning News.
These factors have also contributed to higher housing costs, as the demand for apartments and single-family homes remains strong.
Apartment rents are up 21% across DFW compared to 2020.
Costs for retailers increased as well with regard to renting retail locations and paying appropriate wages to grocery workers.