The cost of your summer cookout is less than six-dollars per person. According to the latest Farm Bureau Marketbasket survey the total cost of 14 food items used to host a summer cookout for 10 people totaled 56-dollars and 47-cents. The same survey conducted on the national level came to 56.38.
The survey’s menu consists of hot dogs and buns, cheeseburgers and buns, ketchup and mustard, pork spare ribs, deli potato salad, baked beans, corn chips, lemonade and watermelon. A new item on this year’s survey is ice cream. Of the items that can be compared with last summer’s survey, five went down in price.
Ketchup went down 18-cents to 1.56 for a 20-ounce bottle. Pork spare ribs dropped by one-dollar and eight-cents, to 11.76 for a four-pound pack. Baked beans were a-dollar-97 a can.
During the last three decades, retail grocery prices have gradually increased while the share of the average dollar spent on food that farm families receive has dropped. In the mid-1970’s, farmers received about one-third of consumer retail food expenditures in grocery stores and restaurants. Since then, that figure has gone down steadily, and is now about 14-point-six-percent, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The U-S-D-A says Americans will spend approximately 10 percent of their disposable annual income on food, the lowest average in the world. Members of Wisconsin Farm Bureau collected price samples of 14 food items in 28 communities, including Marshfield and Medford.