Wheat price drop brings notable Thanksgiving savings for Illinois families

By Catrina Barker | The Center Square contributor
The Center Square

(The Center Square) – Illinois families will see some relief at the Thanksgiving table this year, with the average cost of a classic holiday meal dropping to $49.20, continuing a three-year decline and mirroring the national average of $55.18, a 5% drop from 2024.

Tasha Bunting, associate director of commodities and livestock programs at the Illinois Farm Bureau, said multiple factors are pushing costs down across the state.

“We definitely have seen not only here in Illinois but across the nation within the survey that turkey prices have come down,” Bunting said. “Some of the other ingredients that are used within the meal have come down… like the frozen peas and some of the other staples that we normally have within the Thanksgiving dinner.”

Turkey is playing the biggest role in the overall price drop. Illinois’ average price for a 16-pound frozen bird fell to $18.03, down sharply from the historic spikes seen in 2022, driven then by avian influenza.

“Thankfully, turkey houses and our turkey farmers haven’t had quite the impact the layer operations have seen, so they’ve been able to build back some of the supply in cold storage,” said Bunting. “Turkeys take about 14 to 20 weeks to be market ready, so farmers can turn those birds, get them in storage, and start the next group.”

A layers poultry operation focuses on raising hens to produce a high volume of eggs.

American Farm Bureau Foundation reported that, while the wholesale price for fresh turkey is up from 2024, grocery stores are featuring Thanksgiving deals and attempting to draw consumer demand back to turkey, leading to lower retail prices for a holiday bird.

Bunting said biggest drops were in the dinner rolls, the pie crusts, the stuffing mix and the frozen peas

“All but the peas … contained wheat, and so they’re attributing a lot of that cost decrease to the drop in the price of wheat,” said Bunting.

But not every staple is getting cheaper. Sweet potatoes and veggie trays saw some of the steepest increases, driven largely by weather-related disruptions in key growing regions.

“Most production being in North Carolina and the impacts they saw from hurricanes and other natural disasters… just those complicating factors for those farmers,” Bunting said.

The declines offer some relief after the sharp inflationary spikes of 2021 and 2022, though Farm Bureau leaders say families are still feeling the effects.

“Three years of modest declines have not fully erased the impact of those historic increases,” IFB President Brian Duncan said in a statement.

The Farm Bureau’s Thanksgiving cost survey has tracked meal prices since 1986, using the same menu to allow year-to-year comparisons. Illinois volunteer shoppers collected this year’s data during the first week of November.