Walmart, the nation’s largest food retailer, added a traditional turkey feast to its dining deal three years ago. This year, the 29-item offering, which includes ingredients for a frozen turkey and side dishes, is priced under $55 and aims to serve eight. That works out to less than $7 per person.
Target’s version for four people costs $20, $5 less than the company’s 2023 Thanksgiving meal, and includes a frozen turkey, stuffing mix and canned green beans and canned jellied cranberry sauce. Aldi’s offers a frozen butterball turkey with gravy mix as well as pumpkin ingredients for pumpkin pie and side dishes like sweet potato casserole. The German-owned supermarket chain priced it at $47, saying it was less than it charged for the same items in 2019.
Major, with more than 500 supercenters in the Midwest, jumped into the fray last week by offering frozen turkey for 49 cents a pound or less and Thanksgiving family meals for $37 for groups of four to six. .
Comparing related menus to determine which represents the best value is difficult because recommended serving sizes and ingredients vary. But the promotions, introduced earlier and at a time when many households are reeling from high prices, underscore the importance of Thanksgiving for grocers, analysts said.
Thanksgiving is a sales fest for grocers.
While consumers’ perceptions of grocery prices are based on the price of staples like eggs and milk, “Thanksgiving meals have essentially become the new standard,” said Jason Goldberg, global marketing and communications director, Publix Group. Chief Commerce Strategy Officer.
It’s the second-biggest holiday dining opportunity for retailers behind the feasts that accompany the winter holidays. Market research firm Sarcana said that on average, Thanksgiving meal purchases provided a $2.4 billion sales lift during the week before and after the holiday last year. Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year’s Day food purchases added $5.3 billion to stores compared to an average week, Sarkana said.
Walmart launched its offer two weeks earlier last year on October 14 and plans to make it available by December 24. Two bundles offered by the retailer last year included different items, but Walmart said the price of select products this year is 3.5 percent lower.
John Driggs, Sarkana’s vice president, expects shoppers to buy items on sale for half of what they need to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner meal. That’s double the amount from 2022, when retailers scaled back promotions due to limited supplies left behind by the coronavirus pandemic.
Consumers still aren’t seeing as deep discounts as grocers did before the 2019 pandemic, Driggs said. To attract customers, retailers are creating strategies like meal bundles, which can “reduce stress” for shoppers because they show the price per person, he said.
Angel Rosario Sanchez, 24, of New Jersey, who was at the Walmart store in Secaucus on Wednesday, said he had planned to celebrate Thanksgiving with his friends but hadn’t done any grocery shopping yet. Seeing the large display of Thanksgiving products in the store made him want to return to buy some.
“I always count on Walmart for the deals,” said Rosario Sanchez, who usually chooses to eat from Walmart’s bottom line, the Great Value brand. “Inflation is too high, and it needs to go back to where it was before.”
Getting deals with store labels and national brands
Over the past two years, Walmart, Target and others have seen price-conscious shoppers shift more of their purchases to store label brands. In response, retailers have improved their selection or created new brands of food lines.
Walmart launched Bettergoods, its largest store-label food brand in 20 years in terms of product breadth, in April to appeal to younger consumers who aren’t loyal to national brands and chef-inspired foods. Want those with a higher price.
But store brands aren’t necessarily cheap.
Wells Fargo’s Agri-Food Institute, a team of national industry consultants that provides economic insight and research, compared the costs of store brands and national name brands for a typical Thanksgiving dinner. The name-brand versions of cranberry sauce were less expensive than the store brands the team inventoried, while the name-brand pumpkin pies were the same price versus the store-brand versions.
Robin Wenzel, head of the Wells Fargo Institute, believes makers of some familiar brands realized they were “overshot” with post-pandemic price increases and are pulling back.
The Agrifood Institute’s 10-person Thanksgiving menu includes turkey, stuffing, salad, cranberries, dinner rolls and pumpkin pie. All name brand uses will cost $90 this year, down 0.5% from last year. Preparing the same meal with store-branded food will cost $73, or 2.7% more than a year ago.
This gives buyers the option to mix and match, Wenzel said.
The price of turkey dinner is low, but customers may not notice it
The latest government snapshot of inflation shows that grocery prices rose just 0.1 percent from September to October and just 1.1 percent from a year earlier. This is providing some relief to consumers after food prices have increased by around 23% in the last three years.
For Thanksgiving’s main entrees and beverages, prices are dropping, but given the increase in food prices in recent years, consumers may or may not notice it.
The price of a 15-item Thanksgiving meal averaged $65.51 this year, down about 3 percent from last year but up 42 percent overall from 2019, said retail intelligence provider DataAssembly. For example, a 12-ounce can of jelly cranberry sauce averaged $2.89, down 1% from a year ago but still up 90% from 2019.
A 10-pound frozen turkey averaged $10.40 this year, down 19 percent from 2023 but still up 6 percent from 2019, the data firm said. Prices for some Thanksgiving products are still rising: A 30-ounce box of pumpkin pie mix now costs an average of $5.56, up 6 percent from a year ago and nearly 70 percent from five years ago. According to the data assembly.
Like many food retailers, Walmart included a mix of store and name-brand products in its Thanksgiving bundle. Meal deals include canned jelly cranberry sauce from Ocean Spray, and green beans and dinner rolls from the in-house Great Value line. The bundle also includes fresh items such as a white whole frozen turkey from national brand Shady Brook Farms, and a 5-pound bag of russet potatoes.
Still, many bundles at Walmart and elsewhere will be ignored.
While visiting a Walmart in Secaucus, New Jersey, Nadia Rivest, 70, said she had already shopped at the discounter to buy turkey, fish and chicken for her Thanksgiving meal. But she was only interested in buying fresh produce, not canned goods.
“I like red peppers, red tomatoes, something fresh,” she said.
