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Even a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is not immune to inflation’s bite.
Although grocery prices cooled in July, food costs, overall, are trending higher, according to the latest consumer price index.
As a result of food cost inflation, parents who pack lunches for their school-age children will pay more in the coming academic year compared with last year, a new report by Deloitte also found.
For parents and other caregivers, the average daily cost of packing a lunch for school is now $6.15, according to Deloitte. That’s up 3% on average, compared with the start of the 2024 school year.
“The high point of inflation was really around 2022, but grocery costs today are 20% more than they were five years ago,” said Natalie Martini, Deloitte’s U.S. retail and consumer sector leader and a mother of two school-age children.
That’s driving “a significant increase in the cost to bring a lunch from home,” she added.
President Donald Trump’s blanket tariffs could also bring higher prices on certain foods, experts say, including fresh produce, nuts and cheese.
A separate study by progressive think tanks Groundwork Collaborative and The Century Foundation found that families will pay nearly $163 more this year for school lunch staples — a 5.4% jump over last year — in part because of Trump’s tariff agenda.
“From lunch boxes and notebooks to juice boxes and pencils, parents are being squeezed at every turn,” Liz Pancotti, Groundwork Collaborative’s managing director of policy and advocacy, said in an email.
Also, many school supplies are at least 20% more expensive than they were pre-pandemic, according to a CNBC analysis.
Although school-provided lunches are almost always cheaper and sometimes free, about 42% of the parents polled said their children bring lunch from home on most school days, according to Deloitte’s report. While price is a key issue, healthy eating was the top concern among caregivers, Deloitte found.
Yet those polled said they would switch from name brands to store brands or substitute a cheaper main lunch item, like a less expensive sandwich, to cut costs.
Deloitte surveyed more than 1,200 caregivers of school-age children in May.
School lunches are getting more expensive
School-provided lunches, which cost around $3 on average, are not shielded from price hikes either, largely due to the rising costs of food and labor in addition to staffing shortages, according to the most recent School Nutrition Association annual survey.
The cost of elementary and secondary school lunches rose 3.3% in May 2025 relative to May 2024, according to a consumer price index report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Key legislative reforms over a decade ago paved the way for healthier meals at school with more fruits, vegetables and whole grains on the menu, experts say. However, that also caused costs to increase across the board, as cafeterias integrated more nutritious offerings, the U.S. Department of Agriculture found.
At the same time, nearly 90% of school nutrition directors said worker shortages are a challenge to their operations, particularly when it comes to meeting the new nutritional standards, which require additional staff, training and equipment, according to the School Nutrition Association survey.
Shelly Werger, a mother of seven in Guttenberg, Iowa, said the cost of a school lunch in her district jumped to $4.80 this year from $3.20 the year before.
Despite the price increase, it’s more practical for her youngest children, who are 12 and 16 years old, to buy lunch at school — even though they sometimes complain about the food, Werger said. “They don’t even always like the lunches, but we don’t always have time to make a meal either.”