It's summer and the weather will be great this weekend. It's the perfect time to host a cookout with enough food to feed ten hungry people. How much will it cost to feed all of them in 2026? And how does that compare to last year? Or the year before? Or for that matter, five years ago?
To find out, the American Farm Bureau Federation sent volunteers out grocery shopping for a summer cookout with a list of ten items. The same ten items they send shoppers out for every year when summer arrives. This year, they found the bill for their ten summer cookout items tallied up to $73.82, which is $2.90 or about 4.1% more than 2025's grocery bill. It's also $2.60 or 3.7% more than 2024's summer cookout cost.
Five years ago however, things were really different. Back then, all the Farm Bureau's summer cookout items cost a total of $59.52. That's $14.30 less than they do in 2026.
Summer 2021 however came at the beginning of a period of high inflation was unleashed by the Biden administration. Food prices shot up by 17% by Summer 2022 and by the time Summer 2024 came around, they were 20% higher than they had been in 2021.
The following interactive chart shows how much each individual menu item in the Farm Bureau's summer cookout menu cost in each year from 2021 through 2026. If you're accessing this article on a site that republishes our RSS news feed, you may need to click through to our site to see the chart, which we created using Datawrapper.
The next chart better shows the trends for each of the individual summer cookout menu items:
Most items surged between 2021 and 2022 with inflation. However, only three of the ten items have shown a general upward trend from year to year since: ground beef, hamburger buns, and ice cream.
Two of these items fall into the category of beef or dairy products. These costs have been rising because of the decline of U.S. cattle and dairy herds as a result of drought conditions in 2023-2024, where cattle ranchers and dairy farmers had to make hard choices to reduce the number of cows they raise because of the drought's impact on pastureland and shortages of feed, which has inflated the costs to raise both beef and dairy cattle.
The drought conditions that shrank U.S. beef and dairy cattle herds will have a years-long impact. Even though drought conditions eased in 2025, because it takes about three years to raise cattle for beef production, it will likely be well into 2027 or in 2028 that Americans would reasonably expect see beef prices come down as supply recovery takes place.
Meanwhile, global shortages of wheat from ongoing geopolitical events like the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war are a leading factor behind the rise in bread prices in recent years. In all these cases, reduced supply coupled with continued strong demand has contributed to rising prices.
In an interesting development, the Trump administration announced earlier this week that Walmart will lower the cost of several barbecue essentials by 15%. Walmart has confirmed its price rollbacks, noting the price of one pound of 73% ground beef roll will fall from $6.74 to $5.94, a savings of $0.80 (or about 12%) per pound. For the two pounds of hamburger on the Farm Bureau's summer cookout menu, this change alone would lower the cost of a summer cookout in 2026 by $1.60 to $72.22, making it just a dollar more expensive than it was in 2024.
Walmart is also reducing its price of an 8-ounce package of Lay's Classic Potato Chips from $2.97 to $2.50, which if we double to match the Farm Bureau's 16-ounces of potato chips on its menu, would further reduce the summer cookout cost by an additional $0.94. The combination of price reductions for just these two items would put the cost of a summer cookout in 2026 at $71.28, just $0.06 above what it cost in 2024.
Image credit: Some meat on a grill in the garden during summer photo by Marc Kleen on Unsplash.
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