If you think you’ve been paying more at the grocery store lately, you’re mostly right. You also aren’t alone.
Almost two out of five Granite Staters say they’re experiencing challenges affording basic needs like groceries or medicine because of ballooning housing costs, according to a new poll released by Housing Action New Hampshire. Driven in part by the lingering effect of tariffs on imports from other countries, inflation has also continued to simmer.
Last year, the Monitor began to track grocery prices related to imports from Canada, Mexico and China, the countries targeted by the first round of broad-based tariffs and the United States’ three major trading partners. Frozen potato items, like hash browns produced by Canadian manufacturer McCain’s, farm-raised tilapia produced in China and a variety of produce from Mexico — Hass avocados, limes and tomatoes — as well as imported Modelo beers all made the watchlist.
We visited two popular grocery chains in Concord and found a mixed bag of increases and a few decreases. What customers pay for tomatoes and most meats has increased in the last year, while other items like avocados and beer have generally stayed the same or gone down. The price of eggs skyrocketed during an outbreak of the avian flu in 2022, but has since settled.
Our findings aligned with other national studies that showed grocery prices have not gone down despite the president’s promise to lower them.
Over the course of a year, the same set of groceries imported from Canada, Mexico and China now costs a few dollars more at Market Basket and about the same at Hannaford due to a couple of decreases.
Steady climb of inflation
Early into his second term in April of last year, President Donald Trump announced from the White House’s Rose Garden what was to be “our declaration of economic independence.”
He held a posterboard with an inventory of countries that gave a tit-for-tat account of the tariffs they charged the United States and the “discounted reciprocal tariffs” those nations should expect in retaliation. Whether the levies would herald his envisioned future or, as some feared, incite a trade war and further cramp Americans’ finances remained to seen.
Prices began to rise immediately. Researchers at the Harvard Business School’s Pricing Lab estimate that, while those increases were modest when compared to the actual tariff rates, pass-through from tariffs to consumer goods had added 0.7 percentage points to the all-items Consumer Price Index by September of 2025.
The annual inflation rate stood at 2.9% at the time; without broad-based tariffs, they estimated, inflation would have been dampened at 2.2%. The rapid surge in prices, an indication that “retailers were adjusting prices in anticipation of higher import costs,” gave way to “a series of gradual and incremental changes,” according to the university’s tariffs report.
Currently, the inflation rate is higher than it has been at any point over the course of the last year: 3.3% in March.
Groceries tangibly reflect the creeping march of inflation, but it can be hard to pin down just how tariffs have motivated changes felt at the register.
“Tariffs have increased prices,” said Anton Bekkerman, an agricultural economist and the associate dean for research at UNH’s College of Life Sciences and Agriculture. “It’s less known about how tariffs have changed prices on specific commodities and specific food items because there’s so much that goes into a food item that appears on the shelf in a Hannaford or Shaw’s or Market Basket.”
The extent to which tariffs show up in consumer prices varies depends on a variety of factors, Pricing Lab researchers Alberto Cavallo, Paola Llamas and Franco Vazquez wrote in the non-partisan online publication Econofact in December.
Some domestic manufacturers use foreign inputs, like American farmers who may rely on imported fertilizer. Those producers may try to absorb sunken costs until avoiding passing them through to the consumer is no longer tenable, and when that tipping point arrives, manufacturers may try to circumvent abrupt or precipitous price increases as they weigh long-term customer loyalty. “Shrinkflation,” where prices remain stable but serving sizes shrink, is one such mechanism.
“Companies try to adjust, because they have long-term reputation effects that they’re worried about, and if they change their prices too rapidly, that’s going to impact how consumers view those companies and those retailers over the long term, so they may lose customers in the long run, and they certainly don’t want to do that,” Bekkerman said.
Locally, grocery prices vary
Between March of 2025 and March of 2026, the price of a 12 oz. bag of Nature’s Promise frozen tilapia rose 46.74% at Hannaford, from $5.99 to $8.79. At Market Basket, Cavendish frozen hash brown patties, a product of Canada, increased 32.58%, from $2.64 to $3.50.
The price of some domestic items increased, too. American meat processor Catelli’s ground pork saw a price increase of 14.43% at Hannaford, from $4.99 per pound to $5.71. Its store-brand counterpart at Market Basket, ground pork produced in Canada, climbed more aggressively: 33.44%, from $2.99 per pound to $3.99.
At Hannaford, the price of tomatoes on the vine from Maine increased 4.18%, from $2.39 per pound to $2.49, also marginal in comparison to the same variety of tomatoes imported from the nation’s southern neighbor. Organic tomatoes on the vine sold by Nature’s Promise and grown in Mexico increased 12.53% at Hannaford, from $3.99 per pound to $4.49.
At Market Basket, Mexican tomatoes saw an even sharper price hike: 33.56%, from $1.49 per pound to $1.99. But at both stores, a 12-pack of 12 oz. Modelo beers remained at a stable price, $16.99, and Hass avocados either cheapened or stagnated, as well.
Other factors at play
The impact of tariffs on grocery prices is made more layered and complex by other environmental and geopolitical questions.
Pricing Lab researchers found that, of the three countries targeted by broad-based tariffs in March, the price of Mexican imports remained fairly stable because a large share of goods were exempt from tariffs, as well as because of Mexican leaders’ “more conciliatory stance.”
By contrast, surging fuel prices associated with the war in Iran and the closing of the Strait of Hormuz has more recently applied significant strain to the food system. Any perishable, horticultural good that needs to be transported before it can reach consumers requires refigeration, and fuel-related stickershock can ripple through business decisions, causing price increases both directly and indirectly.
“It’s sort of straightforward to see that if fuel costs go up and it’s more expensive to truck, then we will see higher prices to the grocery store. I think what’s maybe less apparent is, if fuel costs go up in and trucking companies can’t ship as much, maybe labor costs go up and there’s not enough drivers, so those carrots are going to sit in storage and some of them are going to go bad,” Bekkerman said.
Prices spiral upward as more food goes to waste.
“Not only are you getting hit from the fact that it’s more expensive to grow and more expensive to deliver, but it’s also that there’s just a lower supply on the market, and the lower supply naturally leads to higher prices in a broader way.”
While Price Lab researchers concluded that retailer adjustments prevented the Trump administration’s tariffs from reaching full pass-through to consumers, the tariffs’ impact on inflation was “significant.” Bekkerman also warned that, as retailers know, food is ultimately an inelastic good — even if prices continue to rise, and consumers make their own adjustments in accordance with their budgets, “food is never going out of style.”
“We all need it. We’re all going to pay for food. We’re all going to continue buying food. It’s not like we’re going to, you know, movie tickets went up. We’re going to start going to the movies. That’s not the case with food. And we’re seeing that, right? We’re seeing people buy more, or continue to buy food items even at higher prices,” he said.
