KEY POINTS:
Food shoppers have swallowed the biggest monthly price hike in 19 years, but buying the basics is about to get a little bit cheaper.
August delivered the sharpest monthly jump in food prices in almost 30 years, not counting GST.
Wet weather pushed the price of vegetables up
about 14 per cent, with salad staples lettuce and tomatoes costing a third more than they did a month earlier.
But families who are stretching their budgets just to buy the basics should find things a little easier when summer arrives.
The food price index rose 10.6 per cent in the year to August, the steepest climb since 1990.
The surge has been more painful for shoppers because the foods making the biggest jumps are those hardest to do without - bread, vegetables and dairy products.
Now suppliers say bread and vegetables should get cheaper this summer, and milk and butter look set to level off too.
Horticulture New Zealand spokeswoman Leigh Catley said the price of vegetables would drop when the sun arrived.
An unusually wet winter around the country had been disastrous for crops such as tomatoes and leafy greens, which needed sunlight as well as warmth to grow.
But with better weather due any day, Ms Catley said salad prices should drop before the start of summer.
The forecast for another pantry staple, a loaf of bread, is also looking up. Ian Greenshields of Goodman Fielder, the company behind Quality Bakers and the Nature's Fresh, Molenberg and Country Split brands, said wheat and fuel prices had dropped away from the record highs hit earlier this year.
If market conditions stayed the same, he said the price of bread should start to fall in the coming months.
As for milk, butter and cheese, ANZ chief economist Cameron Bagrie warned shoppers not to expect too much relief from eye-popping price hikes.
But as international commodity prices fell, the cost to shoppers would level out. Supermarket prices should have stopped rising by the start of 2009.
Mr Bagrie said the long-term trend for food prices was to rise and rise.
And while it hurt at the checkout, he said that was good news for New Zealand because we export more food than we import.
But Federation of Family Budgeting Services chief executive Raewyn Fox said many families were already at the limit of what they could spend, and faced hard choices about what they could buy.
August topped off the biggest year of rising food costs New Zealand has seen since 1990.
The last time prices rose this much in a month, without GST, was in 1979, when milk rose from 10c a pint to 15c.
The national food bill rose from $13.3 billion in June 2007 to an estimated $14.6 billion in June 2008.