A month ago we wrote about food inflation. The picture has gotten messier — and more useful — since.
Where prices actually are.
The April 2026 BLS release put food-at-home at +2.9% year-over-year. The USDA's 2026 outlook then sliced that average into something a lot more uneven:
- Beef and veal: +9.4% (tight cattle supplies, no relief coming)
- Coffee + non-alcoholic beverages: +5.2%
- Fresh vegetables: +1.4%
- Fresh fruits: ~0%
- Eggs: −27.4% (flocks recovering from avian flu)
Headline says "groceries are up 2.9%." The detail says: steak and your morning coffee are the problem, and produce is basically flat.
The hedge almost nobody uses.
The conventional advice is shop the perimeter, buy store brands, hit warehouse clubs, use coupon apps. Useful. None of it touches the bigger leak: the USDA estimates 30% of food purchased ends up in the trash.
For a household spending $800/month at the grocery store, that's $240 a month going out with the trash bag. $2,880 a year. Cutting that to 15% — entirely doable — adds $1,440 a year to your discretionary spend without changing a thing about what you buy.
That's bigger than the 2.9% inflation. Bigger than coupons and warehouse clubs combined. Your best hedge against grocery inflation is already sitting in your kitchen — you just have to use it.
Good Food IQ — three habits.
The reason most people can't easily halve their waste isn't laziness. It's that nobody teaches the three facts that make it possible:
- What's actually in your fridge. Asked to list every item, most people miss 20–30%.
- How long it lasts. Yogurt past its date is fine for two weeks. Raw chicken at day 4 is not. The labels are conservative; reality is a range.
- What to cook with what's about to spoil. Three things on the verge of going bad shouldn't trigger "let's order out."
That's it. Good Food IQ is the cluster of these three answers. Cheap to build. Compounds for years.
Build it in 15 minutes a week.
Habit 1. Once a week, write down everything in your fridge. Phone notes are fine.
Habit 2. Learn the shelf life of the ten things you buy most. Our free shelf-life directory covers 660+ foods, USDA-sourced, no signup.
Habit 3. Cook from the front of the fridge first. The thing closest to spoiling is the foundation of tonight's meal.
Or let ok2eat do it.
That's what we built — a Good Food IQ machine. Scan a receipt or snap a photo of your groceries (10 seconds, no typing). Every item gets a USDA-backed expiry date. The Eat Me First tab ranks your fridge by urgency every time you open it and offers three recipes that use the soonest-to-spoil items together.
None of this stops beef from going up 9.4%. What it changes is the multiplier between your grocery bill and what becomes a meal.
— Greg, founder of ok2eat