It’s been a heated summer for grocery stores in the Big Apple.
Two weeks ago, Mayor Mamdani unveiled fresh details on his plan to open five city-run grocery stores, including a guaranteed 30 percent discount on a basket of essential goods. The expected discourse followed: Depending on who you ask, the Mayor is either at the cutting edge of urban food policy, or a charlatan who “can’t run a grocery store.”
Either way, the first of Mamdani’s stores isn’t set to open until late 2027. And, as food policy expert Craig Willingham told the Bushwick Daily, the plan offers “five grocery stores in a city of almost 1,000 supermarkets.” Even if it’s a promising step forward in policy, he said, it’s no silver bullet solution for the average grocery shopper.
In the meantime, Brooklyn residents are coping with another year of rising grocery prices. Nationwide inflation is hitting our streets harder than most: In the past year, the price index for groceries in the NYC area has risen by 4 percent, compared with 2.7 percent nationwide. Experts warn that we’re likely to see the delayed impact of tariffs raise grocery prices even higher in the coming months.
Where can a Bushwick grocery shopper catch a break?
This summer, three high school interns at the Bushwick Daily set out to answer that question. Armed with a grocery list of 21 items, we filled our carts at 13 stores across the neighborhood in search of the best deals and lowest prices.
Here are the biggest highlights from our investigation:
Who’s setting the stickers?
To better understand our data, our interns spoke with Craig Willingham, the Managing Director of CUNY’s Urban Food Policy Institute. He told us that much of what we see on our price stickers “comes down to what’s going on with suppliers.”
In other words, seemingly faraway factors like droughts, seed shortages, wars, and increased international demand are the biggest forces behind rising grocery prices.
“Rarely are the prices at the grocery store a product of what the supermarket owner just wants to raise them to randomly,” he said.
Still, grocery operators have some leeway over where they set their prices. In New York City, most grocery stores are independently owned and operated, even when they’re labeled under big chains like Associated or C-Town. That means that stores are free to adjust their prices according to hyperlocal needs, like rent, labor cost, and the average income of their customers.
All of this helps explain why, in Brooklyn, the same tub of Bustelo ground coffee can cost $13.49 at Associated, $8.49 at Food Bazaar, and $6.99 on sale at Met Fresh.
Even two stores of the same chain might set totally different sticker prices. As an example, Willingham pointed to the C-Town in Greenpoint, which more closely resembles a Whole Foods than any of its kin in nearby neighborhoods. A distributor might look at the clientele for Greenpoint C-Town and decide, in Willingham’s words, to give them the “gentrification package” of goods.
All of this makes navigating the grocery scene in Brooklyn particularly dizzying. While Willingham said that there are no golden ticket hacks to saving on groceries, understanding your options as a shopper is one step in the right direction.
How we reported this
We created a grocery list of 21 items, encompassing key staples, all food groups, and a few common treats like ice cream and beer.
For each item in our basket, we recorded the price of a predetermined brand at a fixed quantity. There were a few instances in which we had to opt for a different brand, and sometimes, the item was missing entirely. Those gaps are noted in our data. Any unavoidable discrepancies in quantity or unit measurement are also highlighted.
The stores we visited represented a diverse range of what Bushwick has to offer: big chains, local grocers, natural food markets. Since delis rarely carried every item on our list, we did not include them in this survey.
To keep it fair, every store was visited within the span of two weeks. When items were on sale, we included the discounted price in our final calculations to reflect what a shopper would really spend on a given day.
All price data was collected and analyzed first-hand by our team of interns. The team used Claude Code to turn their design specs into interactive visualizations.
