How much will it cost to feed 10 hungry people at a summer cookout in 2025?
The American Farm Bureau Federation went grocery shopping for a summer cookout to find out their menu costs in 2025. They report their volunteer shoppers found the 10 items they went out to buy cost $70.92. The price is down by 30 cents from the $71.22 they reported last year, but is up 19% from what Americans paid for the same items five years earlier.
Most of that increase has taken place since 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 2025. 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.
This format is nice for seeing the various menu items ranked from year to year, but it isn't great for seeing what trends there may be in the cost for each item from year to year. To better visualize that data, we turned to Microsoft Excel to develop a clustered column chart.
Most items show a surge from 2021 to 2022, coinciding with the high inflation unleashed by former President Biden's policies after March 2021. After 2022 however, most items have either shown flat trends or have even declined by small amounts, with some notable exceptions.
The most notable exceptions involve either beef or dairy products, which is to say they are cow-related [1]. These costs have been rising because of the decline of U.S. cattle and dairy herds because of drought conditions, where cattle ranchers and dairy farmers have 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.
Getting back to the Farm Bureau's analysis of 2025's cost of a summer cookout, they conclude:
After years of sharp food inflation, prices for many Fourth of July staples are finally beginning to level out. While some prices, particularly for proteins, will continue to be volatile due to disease pressures and labor costs, others are stabilizing thanks to improving supply chains and easing input prices.
Which is nice after four years of Bidenflation. In the case of beef and dairy products, we anticipate these costs will remain elevated for at least another 2-4 more years given the time it takes to raise new generations of cows to rebuild herds.
[1] We've been waiting years to use that really bad statistical pun.
Image credit: Group of people cooking on a grill outside photo by Mike Kilcoyne on Unsplash
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