What NZ Households Actually Spend on Food
Food is the budget line everyone argues about, because everyone has a number in their head and nobody's number matches. Stats NZ settles it by asking thousands of households to record what they actually spent. The answer, from the 2023 survey: the average household spends about $299.50 a week on food.
That single figure hides the structure, and the structure is where budgets are won. The survey splits food into its real lines, and the split looks like this:
| Food line | Average weekly spend | Share of food |
|---|---|---|
| Grocery food | $139.40 | 46.5% |
| Restaurant meals and ready-to-eat food | $85.50 | 28.5% |
| Meat, poultry and fish | $31.40 | 10.5% |
| Fruit and vegetables | $27.70 | 9.2% |
| Non-alcoholic beverages | $15.60 | 5.2% |
Two reading rules before using any line. These are averages across all households, including single people and families of six, so your own figure should sit well away from most of them. And the lines follow the survey's classification, which has sharp edges: fruit juice is a beverage, not produce, and a ready-made salad is restaurant and ready-to-eat food. Each line's page spells out what it covers and excludes.
The line that surprises people
The biggest single food line is Grocery food, at $139.40 a week on average. But the structural surprise is eating out: restaurant meals and ready-to-eat food take about 29 per cent of the entire food budget. For every three dollars through a supermarket checkout, roughly another $1.84 goes across a counter for food someone else prepared.
This is why the classic budget advice to compare your supermarket dockets against the national grocery figure misses the point. Grocery food averages $139.40 a week; the household's true food cost is $299.50. The gap between the two is the part of the food budget that moves when habits move, which makes it simultaneously the most cuttable line in a tight month and the easiest one to under-count in a loose one.
None of that is a verdict on eating out. It is a measured share, and knowing yours against the average is more useful than any rule about flat whites, because the average is what the rest of the country is actually doing rather than what a columnist thinks they should do.
Is food really dearer, or does it just feel dearer?
Both, and the survey history separates the two cleanly. In 2007 the average household spent $163.00 a week on food. By 2023 the cash figure was $299.50. That looks like an enormous rise, and most of it is not food at all: it is the dollar shrinking.
Adjust the 2007 figure into today's money and it becomes about $284.16, which sits much closer to the current figure. The real change in what households eat, once prices are stripped out, is a fraction of the headline change. The same correction applies to every category in the survey, and the food category page charts both series so the gap is visible rather than asserted.
The practical use: when your own food spending has risen and you want to know whether that is you or the prices, the adjusted series is the honest baseline. Groceries tracking inflation is not a budgeting failure; groceries outrunning it is worth a look at the lines above to see which one moved.
Putting the lines to work on your own budget
The most effective way to use this data is not to compare your total against the national total, which mostly measures how big your household is. It is to compare line by line. Your fruit and vegetables against the national line, your takeaways against theirs. A line double the national average is not automatically wrong, but it is automatically worth a look, and a line at half suggests either a genuine saving or a misfiled expense.
The budget calculator does this beside each line you enter, adjusted for your household size, region and tenure, which corrects the biggest weakness of a raw national comparison. And each line above links to its own page, with what the line covers, what it deliberately excludes and its history, because most apparent overspends turn out to be classification: the salad that counted as a restaurant, the juice that counted as a beverage.
Averages, national, and 2023 prices: use the shares and the structure with confidence, and hold the levels loosely.
Test Your Knowledge
Quiz on the food budget
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the average household spend on food a week?
About $299.50 in the 2023 survey, across every line classed as food. An average, so a typical household sits somewhat under it.
How much goes on eating out?
Restaurant meals and ready-to-eat food take about 29 per cent of the food budget, which is the share a supermarket-only comparison misses.
Is food dearer than it used to be?
In cash, much dearer: $163.00 a week in 2007 against $299.50 now. Adjusted into today's money the 2007 figure is about $284.16, so most of the rise is prices rather than eating.
Where is the detail for one line?
Every published food line has its own page in the household spending section, with coverage rules and history to 2007.
Related calculators and guides
- The food category page, with both cash and adjusted series charted.
- What households actually spend, every category, not just food.
- Budget Calculator, with each line benchmarked for your household.
- Grocery Budget Calculator, for the supermarket share on its own.
- How supermarket pricing works, the other half of the docket.