🍊 RipeForInflation.com · USDA Data · 2013–2023

The Price of
Eating Well

A decade of produce inflation examined through USDA retail price data across fruits, vegetables, and forms of preparation.

Because eating well shouldn't cost this much.

+23%
Fresh Fruit Inflation
10
Years of Data
132
Produce Items Tracked
1,407
Data Points
Scroll to explore
Visualization 1 & 2: Trend Analysis

A Decade of Rising
Produce Prices

Fresh fruit prices have climbed 23% since 2013, with the sharpest acceleration happening between 2020 and 2022; coinciding with pandemic supply chain disruptions and historic inflation. Fresh vegetables tell a more complex story.

🍎 Fresh Fruit

Average price per cup equivalent, all tracked fruits. The COVID-era spike is unmistakable.

🥦 Fresh Vegetables

Vegetables show more volatility: a dip in 2020 followed by a 2022 peak, then partial recovery.

Visualization 3: Comparative Line Chart

Fruit vs. Vegetables: Side by Side

Both categories overlaid. Note how fruit and vegetables tracked similarly until 2020, then diverged; vegetables partially recovered while fruit continued climbing.

Interactive Explorer: Visualization 4

Explore Any Item

Choose a category, item, and preparation form to trace price changes across all five survey years. Compare retail price per pound (or pint) against price per cup equivalent.

Apples
Fresh · Retail Price per Pound
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Visualization 5: Ranked Bar Charts

Who Rose the Most?

Percent change in average retail price (fresh form) from 2013 to 2023. Some items have seen dramatic increases well above general inflation.

🍊 Top Fruit Price Increases

Fresh form · % change 2013 → 2023

🥕 Top Vegetable Price Increases

Fresh form · % change 2013 → 2023

Advanced Visualization: Form Analysis

Does Form Change
What You Pay?

Fresh isn't always the most expensive option per cup equivalent. Frozen and canned can rival fresh prices, and in some cases exceed them.

$1.55
Average price per cup for canned fruit in 2023, higher than fresh ($1.06) due to added ingredients and processing costs.
$0.63
Juice is the most affordable form per cup equivalent, but at significant nutritional cost in fiber and satiety.
Design note: This chart uses a horizontal bar layout to emphasize the magnitude of differences across categorical forms. Color encodes category (fruit form), and bars are sorted by price to support rapid comparison. Position along the x-axis is the primary encoding channel.

2023 Fruit Prices by Preparation Form

Average price per cup equivalent (all fruit items, 2023)

Final Reflection

What the Data Reveals

On Visualization Design

Each chart type was chosen for a reason. Line charts for temporal trends, horizontal bars for ranked comparisons, and interactive explorers for drill-down analysis.

On Iterative Refinement

Early drafts used generic color palettes and stacked all items onto one chart, creating noise. The final design separates fruit from vegetables, uses consistent color encoding (rust for fruit, sage for vegetables, gold for accent), and leads with story before complexity.

On What the Data Shows

Healthy eating is measurably getting more expensive. Fresh grapefruit rose 55%, peaches 54%, cantaloupe 48%. For lower-income households already allocating a larger share of income to food, this is a public health story, not just an economics one.

Most Proud Of

The interactive explorer (Visualization 4): it transforms 1,407 static data points into a responsive, query-driven tool. Users can compare any item across years and forms, making the dataset genuinely accessible.

What I'd Improve

With more time: CPI-adjusted prices to separate real vs. nominal inflation; geographic breakdowns by U.S. region; and a correlation analysis linking produce price increases to fruit/vegetable consumption rates over the same decade.

Course Principles Applied

Perception: position > color for primary encoding. Ethics: no truncated axes, honest comparisons. Design: de-cluttered grids, consistent type hierarchy, intentional use of negative space. Storytelling: headline first, complexity second.

Data Source

USDA Economic Research Service: "Average Retail Food and Energy Prices, U.S. and Midwest Region." Survey years: 2013, 2016, 2020, 2022, 2023. Data covers average retail prices per pound or pint and price per cup equivalent for fresh, canned, frozen, dried, and juice forms of fruit and vegetables across 132 tracked items. Source: ers.usda.gov