Tariffs, Fuel or Something Else? What’s Behind a Nearly 50% Grocery Jump in New Hampshire
Grocery receipts can climb a little at a time until one day the total makes you do a double take.
A store check at grocery chains around Concord compared prices a year apart, and some items rose far more than others.
Here are the prices many New Hampshirites near Concord have seen on the shelf, and why.
Hannaford’s Frozen Tilapia
Hannaford sells a 12-ounce bag of Nature’s Promise frozen tilapia.
Its price went from $5.99 to $8.79 between March 2025 and March 2026, a Concord Monitor store check found.
That’s $2.80 more for the same 12 ounces.
By our math, that works out to about $7.99 a pound in March 2025 and about $11.72 a pound in March 2026.
This farm-raised tilapia is listed as an import from China.
Nationwide, China supplied 64.5% of U.S. tilapia imports in 2018 and 52.1% in 2024, according to a Mississippi State University Extension analysis.
That’s still more than half.
Those are March 2026 shelf prices, so check the weekly flyer for what your Hannaford charges today.
Market Basket’s Ground Pork
In the same store check, Market Basket’s store-brand ground pork, produced in Canada, rose from $2.99 to $3.99 a pound.
That’s $1 more per pound, a 33.44% increase.
At those prices, 3 pounds of ground pork cost $11.97 in March 2026, up from $8.97.
Hannaford’s Catelli’s ground pork, from an American meat processor, rose less. It went from $4.99 to $5.71 a pound.
Those are different products.
So you can’t read the gap between $3.99 and $5.71 as one store charging more for the same pork.
Psst! How much do you know about shelf prices and the stores behind them? Take our quiz and see how many you can get right.
Quiz
Shelf Price Pop Quiz
Answer these questions on grocery prices, imports and the stores behind them. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
When Athanasios and Efrosini Demoulas opened a small food store on Dummer Street in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1917, which foods did it specialize in selling?
Rest of the Check
Did every price at Hannaford and Market Basket jump like the tilapia?
No.
The Monitor found tomato and meat prices up and a few other items flat or lower.
If you bought Modelo at either store, you paid the same $16.99 for a 12-pack.
Hannaford's tomatoes on the vine from Maine rose only 10 cents a pound.
Other Increases
Mexican tomatoes at Market Basket cost you $1.99 a pound in March 2026, up from $1.49.
Cavendish frozen hash brown patties from Canada cost $3.50 at Market Basket, up from $2.64.
That's 86 cents more.
If you're comparing the two stores, the tilapia's 46.74% was the biggest percentage jump among the items listed.
In plain terms, that's about 47 cents more for every dollar it used to cost.
What the Store Check Can't Show
The Concord Monitor checked two Concord stores and a short list of items.
So don't treat it as a measure of your whole grocery bill.
For the big picture, look at the whole country. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics says its food at home index, which tracks groceries, rose 1.9% over the 12 months ending in March 2026.
The overall food index rose 2.7% over the same 12 months.
A short list of imported goods can run well above that average. Hannaford's tilapia and Market Basket's pork both did.
Tariff Question
The Monitor's check follows imports from Canada, Mexico and China.
It describes them as the countries targeted by the first round of broad-based tariffs.
A tariff is a tax on goods brought in from other countries.
Anton Bekkerman is a farm economist at the University of New Hampshire. He told the Monitor that tariffs have increased prices.
But it's harder to pin down for any one item in your cart.
So much goes into it before it reaches the shelf.
Harvard Business School's Pricing Lab estimated that tariff pass-through to consumer goods had added 0.7 percentage points to the all-items Consumer Price Index by September 2025.
That's about 70 cents on every $100.
Tariffs aren't the only pressure.
A July 2025 analysis from Mississippi State University Extension looked at U.S. tilapia imports.
It found duties peaked at $99.4 million in 2022. Most duties since 2018 fell on Chinese imports.
It found no definite split of the tariff burden between exporting countries and U.S. importers.
So you can't tell from a shelf tag how much of a price jump came from a tariff.
Other Pressures on Prices
Besides tariffs, the Monitor points to fuel as a pressure on your grocery bill.
Surging fuel prices tied to the war in Iran had put significant strain on the food system as of April 2026.
Bekkerman said that if fuel costs rise and trucking companies can't ship as much, some produce could sit in storage and go bad.
He used carrots as the example.
Shrinkflation is another way prices climb.
That's when a price stays stable and the serving size shrinks.
The tilapia doesn't fit that pattern, because you'd pay $2.80 more for the same 12 ounces.
Psst! Want every price pair from the store check in one place? Tap a column heading to sort them.
Affordability Poll
Behind the Hannaford and Market Basket tags, the Monitor's story cites a poll.
Housing Action New Hampshire released it.
That YouGov poll came out in February 2026.
It found that 38% of the state's voters were struggling to afford basic needs like groceries or medicine because of housing costs.
The Monitor rounded that to almost two out of five Granite Staters.
It's a poll of voters, so it can't speak for every resident, whether you rent or own.
The question tied that strain to housing costs. So it doesn't show how much of that strain comes from the grocery aisle.
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