Janae Pierre: Welcome to NYC NOW. I'm Janae Pierre.

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Janae Pierre: Have you heard anything about the free grocery store pop-ups happening around New York City these days? It's becoming more and more obvious that many New Yorkers are dealing with food insecurity along with an increase in grocery prices. On today's episode, we'll get a better understanding of why groceries cost what they do and ways to stretch your dollars, but first, here's what's happening around the city.

Nurses at Mount Sinai and Montefiore have reached tentative agreements that could bring them back to work after nearly a month on the picket line. The New York State Nurses Association says the contracts include a salary boost of 12% over three years, along with new staffing gains. The union announced the tentative deals Monday morning, but nurses must vote on whether to approve the tentative agreements before they can return to work. A Montefiore spokesperson confirmed the news. Mount Sinai did not respond to a request for comment. Nurses on strike at NewYork-Presbyterian are still negotiating with hospital officials.

A federal judge in Manhattan has ordered the Trump administration to resume funding for the Gateway Tunnel Project after work on the Hudson River Rail tunnels halted Friday when the project ran out of money. The Trump administration has been withholding congressionally approved funding for the commuter train tunnel since October. New York Congressman Mike Lawler says getting the Gateway Tunnel Project going is more important than the name of a station. The Republican's comments follow reports that President Trump has offered to unfreeze federal funding for the project if Democrats agree to rename Penn Station and Washington Dulles International Airport after him.

Congressman Mike Lawler: At the end of the day, to me, I really could care less what the name of a building is, a critical infrastructure project is. I care that it gets done. Ultimately, from my vantage point, work it out.

Janae Pierre: Federal funding for the Gateway Tunnel Project was secured years ago, but despite Friday's ruling, it's still not clear when the Trump administration will resume the payments. Congrats to NYU's women's basketball team for making history over the weekend. The Violets won their 82nd game in a row, setting a new national record for Division 3 teams. They beat Carnegie Mellon 69-58. NYU is undefeated this season and chasing a third-straight national title.

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Janae Pierre: Still ahead, a couple of my colleagues have been tracking grocery prices across the city. We'll discuss their findings after a quick break.

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Janae Pierre: New York has been getting a lot of attention lately for free grocery giveaways, pop-ups, and promotions tied to companies like Kalshi and Polymarket. They grab headlines, but they don't last very long. Underneath that is a much bigger reality. Grocery prices in New York aren't random. They're shaped by where stores buy their food, how it gets delivered, what neighborhoods can support which kinds of stores, and who has leverage in their process.

For more than a million New Yorkers dealing with food insecurity, that means the same groceries can cost very different amounts, depending on where you live and where you shop. To understand why, WNYC reporters Karen Yi and Joe Hong spent six months tracking grocery prices across the city, comparing stores, neighborhoods, and supply chains to see what actually drives the cost of food here. They join me now. It's safe to say that this project has changed you?

Karen Yi: Oh, yes, I'm a much better shopper. My mother would be proud. [chuckles]

Janae Pierre: What about you, Joe?

Joe Hong: No, definitely. I think I used to be the one-stop shopper just out of convenience, like, just go to Trader Joe's. Now, I go to a couple of grocery stores that I'll check for sales. It ends up being way cheaper than if I had just done Trader Joe's.

Karen Yi: I think, interestingly enough, that's what really launched this project. I do a lot around affordability, and I was really curious to understand how people receiving SNAP shop, right? In many cases, it's quite a privilege, I think, to be able to go to one store every week, gather your supplies, and then do it again next week. I think that's not the reality for a lot of people. For SNAP shoppers, they have to be super conscious of where they're spending their dollars and making sure that it's finding a way to stretch that dollar. They've always had to think this way. I think with food prices going up, more and more of us are having to think this way.

Janae Pierre: Yes, here we are.

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Joe Hong: We chose 20 stores, but we also wanted to include this element of, like, "Hey, we're just two local reporters who are schlepping around the city, and we can tell you what it feels like to go to a grocery store in East Harlem." Then, within a couple of hours, we're in Flushing at an Asian grocery store that feels totally different to be in. The sensory experience of being in that store is different.

Karen Yi: $1.49 the pound, and then $2.49. Yes, let's stick to the bundle. $2.49 for the bundle.

Joe Hong: Oh, actually, there's more over there.

Karen Yi: Oh, yes? Oh, wait.

Joe Hong: We did the dual bundle.

Karen Yi: Those are still cheaper. Oh, no, $1.49. It was a lot of work. We went all over the five boroughs. We went to Staten Island, the Bronx. We went by car. We went walking. We took the train. I think what Joe and I wanted to bring to this is something new, right? I think the newness of this grocery tracker is that we were physically there every month. Rain, snow, whatever it was, and we experienced all the seasons.

We're picking up the products, talking to grocers along the way, talking to shoppers along the way, listening to the different kinds of music and the different languages around us. We wanted to tell you, "Hey, what does this mean, or is it confusing?" Maybe it means a couple of different things. At the end of the day, what can you, as a consumer, as a shopper, learn from it? Give me something useful here.

Janae Pierre: All right, so how did you two decide what stores to visit and what items to check?

Joe Hong: In each borough, we chose two neighborhoods. One that was more low-income, and one that was more affluent. For determining what a low-income neighborhood is, we used a combination of child poverty data and bodega-to-grocery store ratios that we found in our research.

Janae Pierre: How does that work?

Joe Hong: Brooklyn is a good example. We chose two neighborhoods. Park Slope and Brownsville. Park Slope has, I think, a little less than 1 in 10 kids live in poverty compared to Brownsville, where a majority of kids are considered living in poverty. Then, for the bodega-to-grocery store ratio, if a neighborhood has more bodegas than grocery stores, it illustrates this lack of access to food, right? Was it East Tremont in the Bronx?

Karen Yi: Yes, East Tremont.

Joe Hong: They had a 1:37.

Karen Yi: Right, so one grocery store for every 37 bodegas. This is old data, and it was a pretty standout statistic. That was one of the neighborhoods we picked in the Bronx, and then Riverdale was on the other spectrum of that.

Janae Pierre: Yes, not necessarily a food desert, but certainly an area that could use a grocery store for fresh foods.

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Janae Pierre: You mentioned picking up products. Can you guys tell me how you even came up with what products to check?

Joe Hong: Yes, so we did some preliminary research on the types of groceries that are most commonly purchased in the United States, the types of groceries that fluctuate most in price, typically. We wanted to get a mix of those different types of products, so we chose 11 items, everything from avocados and carrots, apples and bananas. For meat, we did ground beef and chicken breast, and then we did the staples like canned black beans and rice.

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Janae Pierre: You all mentioned hopping around from East Harlem all the way to Jmart, the Asian store in Flushing. What did you learn about the city's grocery system along the way?

Karen Yi: We learned a lot. I wish we had an easy answer about what is the one thing that determines what we pay at checkout when we pick up a jar of mayonnaise or a bag of tomatoes, but it wasn't so simple, right? There's all of these factors that go into what we call the supply chain. Roasters are just the middlemen, right? There's actually a lot of middlemen along the way that determine prices that ultimately trickle down to the consumer.

There's also a lot of these global external factors about weather, drought, sometimes Mexican cartels taking over the avocado trade. All of these things that happen at the grower and distribution at the beginning, that then wholesalers have to account for when they get their cut, that then pass down to the local grocer, that then eventually get passed down to you. To understand what the supply chain really means, Joe and I decided to trace that back a little bit.

We discovered that there is a distribution, one of the largest in the world right here in the five boroughs in the Bronx. It's called Hunts Point. We visited Hunts Point, which is considered a spot market. That's where we met Dan Spoerel. He is a wholesaler at Pan Hellenic Foods. He explained the ecosystem and why sometimes your fruits and your veggies might be cheaper at your corner bodega.

Dan Spoerel: I'm annoying to go shopping with because I'm looking at this and be like, "Oh, I know the guy that sells velvet," and it's in Key Food or King Kullen or Waldbaum's or whatever. I'm like, "Oh, I'm not buying that. That guy's an asshole."

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Dan Spoerel: The retail markup is interesting. I'm always doing the math in my head, and I'm like, "Oh, wow, avocado prices didn't come down." Meanwhile, here, they're dirt cheap. Direct correlation between wholesale pricing and supermarket pricing. When I say "supermarkets," I mean more the bigger chains, smaller mom-and-pop supermarket in the neighborhoods in Brooklyn, they're going to be very susceptible to these. One day, they have it. One day, they don't. They can adjust quicker. That guy can make a decision. What's too high? I don't want it this week, but then what are you going to tell--

Janae Pierre: Two words kept popping up in your reporting that I'd like to talk about. Spot market. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Karen Yi: Yes, and so I was talking earlier about the supply chain. We wanted to understand what that actually means for New York City. New York City is actually a very unique place for grocery stores because, unlike the rest of the country, where Walmart or Wegmans is the only game in town, no grocery company owns a huge share of the stores here, right? No grocer owns more than 10% of the share. There's a lot of competition. You would think that that would make prices better, but really, it doesn't because there's all these other factors in New York.

It's just really expensive to do business here. We were trying to get, say, an avocado and pull the string and be like, "How does this avocado get to your grocery store in New York City?" Some of the avocados, more than half, are coming from a distribution center called Hunts Point. They truck in food from all over the world. They have it lined up. Professional buyers come. Maybe your local bodega comes, and they buy whatever fruits and vegetables look good, are on sale. That's what's called a spot market. There's a lot of price negotiation on the spot.

Dan Spoerel: This is a spot market. You're buying on the spot, so you're susceptible to price increases and price decreases. The bigger chain stores will have contract pricing where they're locked in at a price.

Karen Yi: I think that explains a little bit why sometimes that corner bodega that you walk by with the fruits on the sidewalk has $2.99 or $1.99 raspberries, where you get it at your food town for $6.99, and they're not organic, right? I think that explains a little bit of the price difference because it really depends on where people get it, the deal they can strike. That idea of the spot market was, I think, really interesting to inform the prices and the price variations we were seeing.

Janae Pierre: Joe, lots of factors go into grocery pricing, right? Considering what Karen just told us, shouldn't all of that make prices cheaper in New York City?

Joe Hong: You would think so, but no. New York City groceries are typically more expensive, and that's because rents are so high. There's transportation fees for getting into the city. There's the high labor cost, and business insurance is a wild thing that we learned about. We talked to one grocery store owner. He owns two of the jubilee markets. There's one in the financial district and one in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

The one in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is a little more accessible. The one in the financial district, it's next to all these smaller streets, like cobblestone streets. He said it's so hard for the delivery trucks to deliver the product because the streets are so small. The business insurance is hundreds of thousand dollars more expensive every year for that location. All of that is just going to ramp up prices.

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Karen Yi: The one takeaway from this project is also learning about how grocers are also struggling with rent and space in New York City, just like us. There's this one grocer on Staten Island, Stefan Jones, who we regularly visited. His store is tiny. It was probably the tiniest store we saw. It was in a lower-income neighborhood on Staten Island. He was saying, "Look, I don't even have a basement here, so I can't buy too many cases of one item." If something is a good deal, he can't buy more than six cases because he has nowhere to put it.

Stefan Jones: Like also Coca-Cola, I just got a delivery in for Coca-Cola. Again, all of this goes to the shelf. I don't have no backstock. I have no backroom. Everything that fits, it fits on the shelf because I have nowhere to put it. I have no basement. I have no storage, so it makes it easier for us.

Karen Yi: The way those stores, traditionally in lower-income neighborhoods, maybe with less storage, maybe they don't have their own warehouse like Whole Foods, or their own distributor contracts like Whole Foods, they rely on volume. They got to get stuff in and out, in and out, and are making a couple of cents here and there. That's how they make their profit. It is interesting how storage and space really limit what a grocer can do and, ultimately, the price that you're paying as a customer.

Janae Pierre: Yes, I want to get back to the supply and demand of all of this. We mentioned the avocado earlier, and that's something that's always on my grocery list. Unfortunately, I've been seeing avocados for $3, and that's wild to me. Can you all tell me about your reporting and how you've seen avocados fluctuate?

Karen Yi: Yes, the avocado is in a very emotional fruit. I feel like we were noticing these wild prices pretty early on. We were asking shoppers. Everybody had that reaction, like shopper Blue Carter, she's a shopper in East Harlem, about how she changed her diet because her daughter, I think it was her daughter, really loves the avocado. She's always like, "Are you sure you want me to buy this? Because maybe you'll throw it away, and it's $3 for one pop."

Blue Carter: Oh, my God, the avocado, please. It used to be a couple of cents. Now, it's so expensive. That avocado is ridiculous. I'll tell you that right now. My daughter loves avocado, and I'm just like, "You sure you want this?" [laughs] "Are you positive?" Can we just grow our own at this point? That's the goal. That's the goal, financial freedom. Yes, the avocado is pricey.

Joe Hong: We saw prices go as low as a quarter for an avocado at Jmart to, like you said, $3 for an avocado.

Janae Pierre: It sounds like I need to be at Jmart.

Joe Hong: Yes, yes, and then there's the whole Super Bowl effect, which is people love to eat guacamole at these Super Bowl parties. You see demand go up. Everyone from our friend Dan at Hunts Point to your local grocer is going to see those prices go up. Dan Spoerel, the wholesaler at Pan Hellenic Foods, explained it this way.

Dan Spoerel: Mexico doesn't care that we have it in Super Bowl. They're not picking extra because New York's having a Super Bowl, but there'll be extra demand here for sure. Now, if the supply down in Mexico is short, then, yes, the price will go up.

Janae Pierre: We need our guac.

Joe Hong: Yes, and he is expecting a price spike around this time of year.

Karen Yi: Like Joe is saying, a lot of it does have to do with supply, but grocers do have a little bit of discretion here. Maybe grocers in certain communities know, "Listen, avocado is a must-have in our neighborhood. We cannot jack the price that much." We heard from grocers that they're constantly making these calculations about whether maybe an item, we're just going to lose money on it because we got to keep our customers coming back to our store. If they perceive us to be expensive, they're going to go elsewhere.

Janae Pierre: That's right.

Karen Yi: It's a very competitive market. Like I said earlier, it is this domino effect, but then it gets a little bit muddy because you have so many players in the market making all of these decisions. Another grocer may say, "Mexico's not picking more avocados. We're going to jack up the price," because maybe that's not an item that maybe their customers are really demanding, or maybe that's an item they know people will pay for because New Yorkers love their avocado.

Joe Hong: Ground beef is another example of that. The average price for a pound within our 20 stores went up from $5.80 to $6.60, almost a dollar. That's a big jump. A lot of that was because in the regions where ranchers raise beef cattle, there was a lot of drought. That led to a smaller supply of beef that cranked up prices.

Janae Pierre: It's a real domino effect, for sure.

Karen Yi: Yes, absolutely. Remember, everyone is taking a cut in their share. This isn't a very lucrative business, right? In many cases, grocers are earning 1% to 2% profit and barely keeping their doors open. For low-income neighborhoods, that profit can be even less than 1%. They tend to be the face, right? They're the people we see. We're mad at our grocery price. If you trace it back, wholesalers are also taking their cut.

Everyone's taking their cut to make this business work, but they're all subject to everything that goes on, whether it's tariffs, whether it's the weather, whether it's a drought. On our side, too, like what we demand, whether we now have a new crave for whatever novelty item, or we all need our guacamole or our avocado toast, ground beef patties, hamburgers, whatever it is, right? It's a lot of things that are putting pressure on this very delicate ecosystem.

Janae Pierre: I recall during the holidays when the Feds froze SNAP benefits for most people receiving those benefits. I'm just wondering what that freeze meant for grocery stores and for prices during that time.

Karen Yi: Yes, I'm glad we were doing this project when the SNAP freeze happened because a lot of the reporting and a lot of the focus was on people who are receiving SNAP dollars, right? Rightfully so. They are the ones that were harmed when there was a freeze on their benefits. SNAP dollars essentially is money people use to shop at the stores. Grocery stores are the primary beneficiary of this federal program. We were out in neighborhoods where they were already freezing orders.

They were ordering less food because they were predicting that their shoppers wouldn't be able to afford their groceries because some of these stores, 50% up to 80% of their revenue, relies on SNAP. If you're pulling the rug on this massive revenue source, there's no way you can replace that. The grocery I mentioned before on Staten Island, Stefan Jones, he said they actually had to throw away product because it wasn't selling. You had to throw away a lot of meat?

Stefan Jones: Yes, some of the meat did go bad, and we had to throw it away because there was no business. It hurt big time. Not only us as far as business, but the community as a whole. You could see people that really needed food. Some people that I know, they're coming here all the time. It was like, "Oh, thank God." They're trying to push them. "I didn't have no food for my kids to feed them and stuff like that." I'm like, "Wow, really?"

Karen Yi: It was rough, right? It was really hard for people because, usually, you get your SNAP benefits, and you're there at the store at the beginning of the month. If you don't have that, sales dipped at the beginning of the month for these grocery stores.

Janae Pierre: Fortunately, though, this disruption was just temporary. We know that SNAP benefits later resumed, but those work rules, they changed, right, Karen?

Karen Yi: Right. The SNAP freeze, in a way, we could see it as a window of what's to come, right? SNAP is food benefits. For a long time, New York has had a waiver. If you receive SNAP, they don't require people to prove or show documentation that they are working or in school. The federal administration changed that. Now, all of these people on SNAP are going to have to prove and show documentation that they're working at least 80 hours a month, yes. I think there's a lot of concern that people won't be able to meet these work rules and then will be permanently kicked off the program, or be limited in how many benefits they'll be able to receive.

Grocers are also bracing for that. We were actually talking to them about the impact of SNAP long-term, and then we saw spread of this short-term freeze. All of the concerns and everything Joe talked about, grocers having to cut back on staff, grocers having to offer maybe less selection on products, grocers may be having to throw away food, all of those concerns still exist. It's just going to happen over a prolonged period of Time. The work rules have already kicked in, and we're going to start seeing people get kicked off their benefits as soon as March.

Janae Pierre: Honestly, now that I'm understanding this reporting and better understanding what's going on at grocery stores, I've also seen this play out at my local bodega, throwing away bananas and fruits that have not been purchased yet.

Karen Yi: Right. There is a lot of food waste because, like I mentioned, a lot of these stores and bodegas, they make their profit. They survive in the community by volume of sales, right? Everyone's picking up a banana or two on their way to work, picking up a gallon of milk on their way to school. If those little purchases aren't happening, those add up.

Janae Pierre: Yes, so I need to know, what's the hack here? What's the secret? Where's the cheapest basket of items that you found? What store should I be shopping at, basically?

Joe Hong: The biggest takeaway is that the days of one-stop shopping are over. You have to make multiple stops. There are sales that you got to map out, figure out what you want to buy, and where.

Karen Yi: We keep going back to this thing, but it's really the takeaway. I think you just have to be a lot more mindful at the store. Grocery stores have devised this food math to make it all work. Maybe your store is charging you more for what they consider a premium item. Maybe something that's organic, maybe something that's harder to get. The surcharge on that is much more than maybe what they pay because that's how they're making their profit, right?

Stores are generally not going to make their profit off of basic staples like milk, beans, and rice. Like the avocado, right? The avocado, maybe you can get them cheaper at ALDI. Maybe you can get them cheaper at Jmart, right? I think you have to be just a smarter consumer. Because if everybody on the supply line is able to make calculations and negotiations and bargains on what they're buying, so should you.

Janae Pierre: Joe?

Joe Hong: Yes, I think the slogan for this project has been, "Grocery prices are more art than science." I think going into this, I expected grocery prices to be set very algorithmically, almost like prices on Amazon or something. Grocery store owners are really trying to game the system of, like, "Oh, this thing is selling well. Does it mean I can just raise prices?" No, that's not always the case.

They're trying to maintain relationships with their customers. A version of that is happening at every level of the supply chain. Even at Hunts Point, wholesalers will take a small loss if that means maintaining a long-term relationship with a buyer. When I learned that grocery stores are maybe making 1% margins, it just makes me feel like, "Oh, we're all on this together."

Janae Pierre: Everyone struggling.

Joe Hong: Yes, yes.

Karen Yi: I think the other thing is talk to your local grocer. Maybe find out, "Hey, what day of the week do you get your produce?" Then maybe ask them what day of the week is a good day to come back because maybe it's going bad, right? You can get it on a sale because they're trying to get rid of their softer avocados. I think, again, consider your grocer as part of your community and have that conversation with them, too.

Janae Pierre: Will do. That's WNYC's Karen Yi and Joe Hong. Thanks, you two.

Karen Yi: Thanks, Janae.

Joe Hong: Thank you.

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Janae Pierre: Thank you for listening to NYC NOW. I'm Janae Pierre. See you soon.

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