Last Year’s Thanksgiving Veggie Tray Jumped 61% While Rolls Fell 15%: What the 2026 Forecast Means for Virginians
The price farmers get for fresh vegetables has swung hard this year.
Store prices usually trail farm prices, so those swings may be a clue to what your Thanksgiving groceries will cost.
Here’s what the forecast hints at for Virginians’ holiday bill, and what it doesn’t.
Note: This is general information, not financial advice. Food price forecasts and dollar amounts are subject to change.
The Forecast Range
The Economic Research Service (ERS) is part of USDA.
Its forecast range for fresh vegetables in 2026 runs from 4.8% to 6.8%, and the 5.8% sits right in the middle.
Fresh vegetables rank third highest of the nine food-at-home categories the summary gives a 2026 number for.
Only beef and veal and sugar and sweets are higher.
Only three of the 15 categories, eggs, dairy products and fats and oils, are forecast to fall in 2026.
The same outlook has grocery prices overall up 2.3%. So fresh vegetables are forecast to rise 3.5 percentage points more.
ERS posted the October outlook on Oct. 23.
Its figures cover the whole country, so none of them is a Virginia price.
A new outlook typically comes out around the 25th of each month. Each ERS number here comes from the October release.
What 5.8% Looks Like
ERS says the midpoint of a forecast range is the most likely yearly price increase.
The 5.8% compares the average price across all of 2026 with the average across all of 2025.
Here’s what that looks like. If you spend $20 on fresh vegetables, a 5.8% rise adds $1.16, for a total of $21.16.
At the 4.8% low end, the total is $20.96. At the 6.8% high end, it’s $21.36.
In the October outlook, retail fresh vegetable prices were 2.8% higher in September 2026 than in September 2025.
They rose 0.2% from August to September 2026.
Behind the Forecast
ERS says its forecasts rest on statistical models fitted to recent trends in the data.
“Farm level” means the price growers get.
There, vegetable prices are forecast to increase 21.2% in 2026, with a range of 14.1% to 30.6%.
ERS says farm-level vegetable prices can swing widely with weather, production and seasonality.
This fall they jumped.
Prices rose 37.3% from August to September 2026.
So September’s farm-level fresh vegetable prices were 29.6% higher than in September 2025.
The price you pay at the store typically lags farm-level prices.
So the farm figures are a clue to what may soon reach grocery shelves.
Farm prices also swing far more than store prices.
Last Year’s Side Prices
The American Farm Bureau Federation priced individual sides in a November 2025 survey.
Some cost more than a year earlier, even as the turkey got cheaper.
A veggie tray of carrots and celery cost $1.36 a pound, up 61.3% from the year before.
That rise was about 52 cents.
Fresh vegetables are usually cheap, so a few cents can swing the percentage.
Fresh produce prices tend to swing a lot. Weather, labor shortages or transportation delays can cause sharp, short-term spikes.
Sweet potatoes, at three pounds for $4.00, rose 37%.
The survey ties part of that to hurricane damage in North Carolina, the largest grower.
Frozen peas, at a pound for $2.03, rose 17.2%.
Not every side rose.
Fresh cranberries, stuffing mix and a dozen dinner rolls went the other way, falling 2.8%, 9% and 14.6%.
The classic dinner for 10 still came to $55.18, down 5% from 2024, with the cheaper turkey helping pull the total down.
Those are single grocery items from last year.
You can’t line them up neatly with the 2026 ERS forecast for fresh vegetables as a whole.
Turkey Prices
If you’re buying the turkey, the closest line in the October outlook is poultry.
Poultry is forecast to rise 1.2% in 2026, with a range of 0.5% to 1.9%.
In September 2026, poultry prices were 1.1% higher than in September 2025.
BLS files turkey under other uncooked poultry, so poultry as a whole is only a rough stand-in.
Last year’s Farm Bureau survey priced a 16-pound frozen turkey at $21.50, or $1.34 a pound.
That was down 16.3%.
The drop was linked to store turkey deals and weaker demand.
So the fresh vegetable forecast is 4.6 percentage points above the poultry forecast.
In plain terms, vegetables are forecast to climb faster than turkey.
Psst! How much do you know about the Thanksgiving table? Take our quiz and see if you can ace it.
Quiz
Thanksgiving Price IQ
Answer these questions on Thanksgiving food prices and the numbers behind them. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
USDA’s Economic Research Service, in its October 2026 outlook, forecasts fresh vegetable prices to rise about how much in 2026?
South Region Prices
BLS counts Virginia in its South region.
That makes it a regional read for you, not a Virginia price.
Prices rose in five of the six major grocery store food groups over the 12 months ending September 2026.
Dairy was the one group that fell, down 2.8%.
All food in the region rose 2.2%.
For the 12 months ending September 2026, the BLS South release put food at home up 1.7% and food away from home up 3.1%.
Its fruits and vegetables index rose 2.7% over those 12 months. That's a broader group than the fresh vegetables in the ERS forecast.
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