October 13, 2025
Trail Mix Brief: Restaurant Prices Are the Sticky Part of Inflation
Everyone talks about grocery inflation because it’s easy to see — the milk, the eggs, the checkout total that feels like a minor car payment. But the quieter story in 2025 is the one that’s still hanging around your dinner bill.
The Big Picture
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, restaurant prices (“food away from home”) are up 3.9% over the past year. Grocery prices (“food at home”) are up 2.7%. That gap might not sound dramatic, but stretch it out: since early 2020, menus are up roughly 28–29%, while groceries rose about 22%. In other words, supermarkets cooled down after the pandemic, but restaurants never gave back their gains.
The reasons are structural. A grocery store’s biggest cost is what’s on the shelf — items that respond fairly quickly to commodity cycles. Restaurants, by contrast, are built on people, power, and space. Those costs rarely move downward.
Why Restaurant Inflation Sticks
Labor: Wages climbed sharply during the staffing crunch of 2021–22, and restaurants had to keep them high to retain workers. When grocery chains automate checkout, they save. When restaurants lose a line cook, they bleed.
Rent and utilities: Commercial leases and energy bills don’t “deflate.” Once those increases are baked in, they stay baked in.
Food costs: While overall food inflation has slowed, key ingredients like dairy, produce, and meats still fluctuate at uncomfortable levels. And restaurants can’t swap suppliers as easily as grocers can.
Payment processing: Swipe and delivery app fees quietly eat into margins. Every card tap or online order costs a few cents more than it used to.
So restaurants raise prices gradually — but permanently.
How You Feel It Without Seeing It
Not every increase shows up as a higher sticker price. The industry calls it “menu engineering.” Customers call it “something feels smaller.”
- Portion sizes shrink: the six-ounce chicken breast quietly becomes five.
- Substitutions creep in: pollock instead of cod, iceberg instead of mixed greens, a “house cheese blend” instead of the sharp cheddar.
- “Value meals” and “bundles” reframe pricing: what looks like a deal is often yesterday’s regular price with a side of fries.
- New fees: “service,” “kitchen,” or “sustainability” charges turn up at the bottom of the check — surcharges in disguise.
The Behavioral Shift
Consumers notice. Dine-in traffic is soft, delivery spending is up, and “dining on a deal” has become the new norm. Chains now test loyalty programs and off-peak discounts like airlines. Some are experimenting with dynamic pricing, where the same burger costs more at 7 p.m. than at 3.
Still, restaurants aren’t losing all their leverage. Cooking at home still carries its own costs — time, groceries, and energy. Eating out may feel indulgent again, but convenience inflation has its audience.
The Outlook
The USDA forecasts restaurant prices rising another 3–4% through the rest of 2025. That’s slower than the pandemic spikes, but it confirms the new normal: menu inflation is sticky, not spiky.
The Takeaway
Grocery inflation made the headlines, but restaurant inflation rewrote the baseline. Eating out didn’t get cheaper — it just got subtler.
If you’ve been wondering why the entrée feels smaller and the check feels larger, you’re not imagining it. The data says you’re right.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics (CPI), USDA Economic Research Service, National Restaurant Association (2024–25).
Trail Mix Briefs dig into the data behind the noise — short reads built for people who still like facts with their outrage. Written and researched for TrailMix.cc by Craig Crawford and team. Data verified by ChatGPT.