Food spending in Australia, 2019 vs 2023

And can I resist ultraprocessed foods as easily in Australia as I do in the US?

We’ve been back in the US for a bit over a week now, and I’ve been able to answer a question that I wondered before the trip: will my more recent vendetta against ultraprocessed foods carry over to Australia, or will I be tempted by the chocolates, biscuits, and ice creams that featured heavily in my childhood and therefore do have all the emotional ties and nostalgia that similar foods in America don’t? On previous trips to Australia, I would buy and eat more chocolates, biscuits, and ice creams than I ordinarily would (even when I lived there), because there was limited time and opportunity to eat them. The attitude was, ‘Well, we’re only here for a few weeks, so I’m going to eat more Twirls, Maltesers, Dairy Milk, Tim Tams, digestives, and Mint Slices than usual because they’ll be gone as soon as we go back to the US.’ I would eat Twisties and Burger Rings and Golden Gaytimes purely for novelty and nostalgia, even though prior to moving to the US it had been years since I’d eaten those things. 

The move to reduce and minimise the UPFs in the past few months (or years, I guess) has been reasonably easy for me because I don’t like most chocolate here, and the chips and other savoury snacks don’t hold any nostalgic pull. I don’t look at Twinkies and think fondly of my childhood (if anything, Twinkies remind me of Claudia Kishi, junk food connoisseur of the Baby-Sitters Club). But I knew going to Australia would mean access to Toobs, Pods, Cadbury (that is actually made by Cadbury and not Hershey’s but slapped with a Cadbury label, like it is here), and all manner of Arnott’s biscuits. Would the temptation of fond childhood memories override my strong desire to not eat UPFs? 

Well, I was mildly surprised to find that actually yes, my desire to not eat UPFs did actually mean I didn’t eat Toobs, Twisties, Burger Rings or Pods this time. I didn’t even buy any Cadbury chocolate because I’d read complaints on reddit about Cadbury going downhill (I did, however, buy a couple of blocks of Whittaker’s instead). I bought one box of Pine Lime Splices because I promised the kids that they could have the ice cream from Bluey, and I’m almost certain that’s the ice cream that Bluey is eating at the end of the Ragdoll episode. The amount of chocolate and biscuits I brought back to the US also decreased dramatically. 

In 2019, I spent $24.45* on chocolate, and in 2023 I spent $91.20 — but this included $48.30 at Haigh’s, a fancy chocolate shop), so I’m not sure if this is an accurate reflection of the difference or of inflation. Despite the difference in numbers, I think we definitely bought less on this trip than earlier ones (though I might be getting 2019 mixed up with trips we made even earlier, where I for sure bought more chocolate but wasn’t logging food spending). 

The biscuit spend in 2019 was $53.49, and in 2023 it was $49. This is a total decrease, but it’s even more significant if you break it down by cost per day per person. In 2019, the trip was 19 days long with three people, and in 2023, it was 27 days long with four people. The biscuit spend per day per person in 2019 was $0.94, and in 2023 that number was almost halved, to $0.45. I didn’t buy a single packet of digestives or Mint Slices. 

The groceries I bought more of this time changed too. I introduced the kids to jaffles (see my previous post), so expenditure on bread, deli meat, and cheese went up from 2019. I also spent a lot more on fruit and veg. Because I wasn’t cooking, and my kids weren’t a fan of the way my mum cooked vegetables, the only way to get them to eat any plant matter was to give them cucumber sticks, capsicum sticks, grape tomatoes, and fruit. They ate a LOT of kiwi fruit on this trip. Two per child on an almost daily basis. Fruit spend in 2019 was $33.73 ($0.59 per day per person), and in 2023 that increased to $84 ($0.78 per day per person). Vegetable expenditure in 2019 was $14.47 (and that was entirely because of the roasted gnocchi and veg dish we cooked at my friend Torbjorn’s house; yes Torbs, I did track that grocery shop at Foodland!), and in 2023 it was $67.51 (cucumbers, capsicums, tomatoes, and just one salad kit). 

One category had a rather dramatic increase in expenditure: tea. In 2019, I spent $57.79 on tea, and in 2023 I spent $201.80**. To be fair, $85.80 of that was at T2, the specialty Australian tea shop that I have loved for a long time. They had Sydney Breakfast, Canberra Breakfast, and Melbourne Breakfast teas all in gorgeous tins! I couldn’t not. Even if you take out the tins from T2, that’s still $116 on tea. This is for two reasons. One, is that Yorkshire tea got more expensive. Four years ago, it was around $5 a box, and now it’s about $8 a box. And two, I discovered that Coles, a supermarket, now sells some of the more popular T2 teas (which go for about $16 a pop), so on our last days in Sydney when my husband told me we had suitcase space, I stocked up. And now I have some Gorgeous Geisha, lemongrass and ginger, and the T2 classic French Earl Grey. Plus six boxes of Yorkshire tea. This ought to be enough to last me until the next trip back. 

(Pictured below are the T2 tins. Just look at them! The art is wonderful! Whimsical and Australian and perfect!)

Our grocery total, in the end, was higher in 2023 than in 2019. In 2019 we spent $287.81 ($193.41USD. This equated to $5.05/$USD3.39 per person per day). In 2023, we spent $686.66 ($USD442.58, which was $6.36/$USD4.10 per person per day). This was somewhat expected given there was an extra mouth to feed and I spent more on fruits, veg, and snacks from the supermarket for them. 

The most surprising part of our food expenditure in Australia was our eating out total. In 2019, the total was $827.93 ($USD555.94), and in 2023 this figure jumped to $1,316.74 ($USD848.69). But when you break that down into cost per person per day (because in 2019 we were there for a week less and Charlie was the size of a lentil in my uterus, not a three-year-old proper human who eats real food), you see that we spent less on this trip than the last one. In 2019 we spent $14.53 per person per day, and in 2023 we spent $12.19 per person per day. This is most likely due to not going out for dinners very much (you don’t mess with bedtime, especially when the kids have such full and active days that they’re asleep by 7pm every night), eating more at food courts which are cheaper, and consciously trying to eat at home more because of the increased cost of eating out which I think everyone in Australia is aware of.

(The babycinos they got at this cafe were magnificent. We ordered Tilly’s first because Charlie said he didn’t want one. Changed his mind when he saw Tilly’s so we ordered one for him too. When it arrived he decided that no, actually he really didn’t want it so I had it instead. Who can resist all that foamy goodness?!)

I should note that neither our grocery nor eating out expenditures in Australia are reflective of what our real life is like. We stayed with my parents for the whole trip, and they paid for the majority of the food we ate. They bought all of the kiwis (my fruit expenditure was primarily on blueberries and raspberries), paid for the ingredients of the meals cooked by my mum, and bought us meals from restaurants on numerous occasions. We were also treated to a delicious Persian feast cooked by my friend Brad, dinners from our friends Alison and Matthew, a barbecue lunch from our friends Nicole and Trent, and meals and coffees eaten out from other friends (thank you, Simon and Tina, Marita, Donald, and John). In our real life here, we pay for most of the food we consume, and if we were living in Australia, I imagine our Australian food expenditure would be quite different to what August 2023 showed (eye-wateringly higher would be my guess). 

I will say, though, that I thought food would be a lot more expensive in Australia than in the US, and shockingly it wasn’t. This applies both to the groceries and to eating out. It was more expensive than I remembered, and this is because of inflation in recent years but also partly because the last time I did any regular food shopping and eating out in Australia was almost a decade ago, so those are the prices that are stuck in my mind. I still expect a medium McValue meal at Macca’s to be $5.45, a soft serve cone to be thirty cents, a loaf of bread to be about $2, a box of ice blocks to be about $5, and a small packet of hot chips to be $2. You know, back in my day. So yeah, eating out and buying food has become more expensive, for sure. But when I compare the cost of bananas, capsicum, yoghurt, milk, and eating out at a nice cafe or restaurant to what it costs in the US, it’s basically the same. Or even cheaper in Australia, for some things (especially if you factor in the exchange rate). Whoever would have thought that? Australia, which has for a long time been more expensive than the US for food, books, and clothes, actually has cheaper food. A more useful analysis would look at things like wages and purchasing power parity and then you could have a more accurate assessment of which country has cheaper food. But sadly, I’m not an economist so that analysis will not be forthcoming (at least, not from me).

*Unless otherwise noted, all amounts are in AUD. In the cases where I show USD as well, I used the exchange rate that was current for the time of the trip. For the 2023 trip, $1USD was about $0.64AUD.

**I didn’t bother with the cost per day per person for tea, because for both trips the majority of the tea was bought to be brought back to the US and not consumed in Australia, so the length of the trip is irrelevant. And the kids aren’t drinking tea so the change in number of people doesn’t matter.