Frozen Lasagna Is a Key Indicator for Inflation, Says Fed Official Neel Kashkari
Written by
Josephine Nesbit
Edited by
Nicholas Morine
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In the U.S., the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes monthly consumer price index (CPI) reports, which are a measure of the average change in prices paid by consumers over time. While the CPI is the most widely used measure of inflation, CNN reported that one Federal Reserve official has his own unconventional method for keeping tabs on inflation.
Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, revealed to CNN in a Feb. 7 interview that he keeps track of the price of frozen lasagna, specifically Stouffer’s party-size offering.
“I pay attention to grocery prices,” Kashkari said. “There’s this large tray of lasagna that I used to buy that used to cost $16, now it’s around $21. That’s my own little measuring stick of how inflation is going.”
Kashkari says inflation pressures are easing, but the Fed will likely continue raising interest rates to push inflation back down. The Federal Reserve raised interest rates eight times since March 2022, as previously reported by GOBankingRates, and financial analysts with Goldman Sachs say rate cuts aren’t likely until 2024.
“We have more work to do,” Kashkari told CNN’s Poppy Harlow. According to Kashkari, the labor market is “too hot” and this is why it’s “harder to bring inflation back down.”
Kashkari isn’t the only one keeping an eye on frozen lasagna prices. “I gauge inflation based on Stouffer’s frozen 4 meat lasagna,” one person tweeted last year, as reported by Morningstar.
There are other unconventional ways to track inflation. For example, Morningstar pointed out that the lighthearted “Big Mac index,” created by The Economist, tracks the cost of McDonald’s popular sandwich across the world to see if currencies are at their “correct” level. However, “burgernomics” was never meant to be a precise measurement of currency levels.
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