The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division has widened its year-long look at beef prices beyond the meatpacking plants and onto the shelves where households actually shop. Four of the country’s biggest grocery sellers — Walmart, Costco, Amazon and Kroger — are now among eight retailers that received formal letters asking about recent increases in retail beef…

A new 30-day window for cheaper imported beef opened this week, timed to a cattle shortage that has pushed ground beef prices to some of the highest levels on record. Starting September 1, the first of three monthly allotments of duty-reduced lean beef trimmings became available to importers, and it closes again at the end…

Freight haulers paid $5.599 for a gallon of diesel last week, the fuel that moves nearly every trucked item on a grocery store shelf from the farm or port to the checkout line. That’s down slightly from the week before, but it’s nearly 50 percent above what the same tank cost a year ago —…

The national average for a gallon of regular gasoline came in at $4.071 last week, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Monday survey of retail stations across the country. That’s a few cents cheaper than the week before, but it sits 89 cents higher than drivers paid at the same point last year. For…

Beef gets the headlines, but it is not the only grocery category running hot in USDA’s own price data this year. The Economic Research Service now forecasts sugar and sweets prices, the category that covers candy and chocolate, rising 7.1 percent in 2026. That puts it among the fastest-growing sections of the grocery store, well…

Grocery shoppers who have noticed the price of ground beef and steak climbing faster than everything else in the cart are not imagining it. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service now forecasts beef and veal prices rising 9.8 percent for all of 2026, the steepest projected increase among the 15 major grocery categories…

Long before a loaf of bread or a box of cereal gets a new price tag, the wheat that goes into it gets one first. USDA’s Economic Research Service reported this week that the price farmers are paid for wheat jumped 9.3 percent in a single month, from June to July 2026, and now sits…

Every month, USDA’s Economic Research Service updates its outlook for how much grocery prices will rise over the full year, based on the newest inflation data available. The August update, posted August 25, lowered that outlook: food-at-home prices, the government’s term for what people spend at grocery stores and supermarkets, are now forecast to rise…

It sounds like a contradiction. A jar of cheese dip, a stick of butter, or a bag of beef jerky can no longer help a grocery store qualify to accept SNAP benefits, yet a SNAP shopper can still walk up to the register and buy any of them with an EBT card. That is not…

For a small grocery or convenience store that accepts SNAP, missing a paperwork deadline is rarely fatal. A new federal stocking rule set to take full effect this fall changes that calculus for one specific requirement: what a store actually has on its shelves. Retailers that cannot show enough variety in a handful of food…