In the latest monthly survey, several cities in California have performed well in a ranking of the cities in the United States with the highest and lowest food and grocery expenditures. Conducted by the personal finance website WallHub, this ranking examined the proportion of residents’ daily food and grocery expenditures to their income among 100 cities in the United States, with 17 cities from California included.
Among the top 10 cities with the lowest proportion of food and grocery expenditures to income, California claimed 6 spots. The top 4 cities were all from California, including Fremont, San Jose, San Francisco in Northern California, and Irvine in Southern California, with the percentages of food and grocery expenditures to monthly household income ranging from 0.96% to 1.23%.
Los Angeles ranked 50th on the list, with residents’ food and grocery expenditures accounting for 1.98% of their monthly household income. Santa Clarita in northern Los Angeles County and Huntington Beach in Orange County were ranked 8th and 9th, respectively.
Looking at the entire United States, the top 5 cities with the highest proportion of food and grocery expenditures to income were Detroit in Michigan, Cleveland in Ohio, Birmingham in Alabama, Newark in New Jersey, and Toledo in Ohio, with percentages ranging from 3.09% to 3.78%.
The report pointed out that in cities with the highest proportion, residents allocate such a high percentage of their income to purchasing food and groceries not due to local price factors but because of lower income levels. For example, the median household income in Detroit is second to last in the country at only $39,575. Cleveland, ranking second in terms of highest percentage, also has a median household income of $39,187, the lowest in the nation.
Fremont in California, the city with the lowest proportion of food and grocery expenditures, had a median household income of approximately $176,530 in 2023, according to the city’s website.
WallHub’s ranking methodology involved analyzing the prices of 26 components of food and grocery items in the top 100 cities, including meat, dairy products, vegetables, and cleaning products. The individual costs of these components were added up and compared to the median monthly income of each city for the ranking. The data used in the analysis were collected from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis in September of this year.
The analysis report also provided some money-saving tips, such as budgeting, creating shopping lists, avoiding impulse buying, using appropriate credit cards that can help save 1.5% to 6% on purchases, taking advantage of discount opportunities, finding clearance items before they expire, considering warehouse stores for additional discounts, and more.