The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its July Consumer Price Index at 8:30 a.m. Eastern this morning and it reports that the all-items index rose 3.4% over the past year, edging down from June's 3.5% and landing almost exactly where Wall Street economists surveyed by NBC News had projected. Core inflation, which strips out food and energy, cooled to 2.5% from 2.6%. Food prices overall climbed 3.0% over the year, with the grocery-store subset — what economists call "food at home" — up a milder 2.7%. USDA's Economic Research Service still projects food-at-home prices will land somewhere between 1.6% and 3.9% for full-year 2026, with restaurant prices running hotter, near 3.5%. Those averages, though, continue to mask sharp divides between individual staples — some sitting well below their pandemic-era peaks, others still setting records.
Beef keeps setting records as the cattle herd hits a 75-year low
No grocery category has hit Latino kitchens harder than beef, and nothing in the new data changes that. Years of drought pushed ranchers to shrink their herds rather than rebuild them, and the nation's cattle inventory now sits at 86.2 million head — the smallest count since 1951, a run of scarcity now in its eighth straight year of contraction. That shortage has pushed retail beef and veal prices up 11.8% over the past year, with ground beef averaging $6.83 a pound nationally, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics retail tracking. USDA forecasters expect beef prices to climb another 10.7% for the full year, and because cattle herds take three to four years to rebuild once ranchers start retaining more animals, meaningful relief isn't expected before the end of the decade.
Chicken tightens while eggs keep falling — two numbers that look contradictory but aren't
Poultry supply and egg supply are telling opposite stories. A wave of bird flu trimmed U.S. chicken production by 3% in January compared with a year earlier, even as retail chicken breast held relatively steady around $4.18 a pound. Eggs, by contrast, are in genuine freefall: retail prices sit near $2.14 a dozen, down 27.9% from a year ago as recovering flocks finally outpace new avian-flu losses, and USDA projects a roughly 31% decline for the full year. That said, one seemingly contradictory figure is worth explaining rather than glossing over — BLS's seasonally adjusted egg index, which strips out the normal spring dip in egg demand, actually rose 4.3% in June alone but the broader trend for eggs remains sharply downward.
Milk's climb shows a crack — and the tortilla-corn tariff needs another source
Dairy had been one of 2026's fastest-climbing grocery categories, with whole milk up roughly 9% and the broader dairy index up 6.6% over the year through June, pushing the average gallon toward $4.32. But the CPI report that published this morning complicates that picture: the dairy index actually slipped 0.1% for the month of July and is now down 0.5% over the full past year — a real reversal, even if it's only one month of data so far and too early to call a new trend. Corn, the base ingredient for the tortillas central to many Latino diets, faces a separate and less settled pressure point: one industry analysis has pointed to a 25% tariff on imported corn raising costs for tortilla producers.
Tomatoes still carry the tariff — but lettuce just posted a sharp reversal
Fresh vegetables overall remain a relatively mild inflation category, with USDA projecting roughly a 6.8% rise for the year. Tomatoes remain the clear exception. Since Washington imposed a 17.09% tariff on most Mexican tomato imports in mid-2025 — a duty the U.S. International Trade Commission upheld again in July 2026 after Mexican producers sought its removal — retail tomato prices have climbed 19.5% over the past year in a market where Mexico still supplies roughly 70% of U.S. fresh tomato consumption. Lettuce had been running even hotter, up 32.1% over the same period through June. But the same July report that confirmed the cooling headline number also showed lettuce prices falling 16.4% in a single month — the sharpest movement of any grocery item in the release, and a signal, however preliminary, that the spring and summer produce spike may be starting to unwind. For households leaning on tomatoes and lettuce for salsas, sofrito and everyday Mexican, Central American and Caribbean cooking, both the persistence of the tomato tariff and the lettuce reversal are worth watching in next month's data.
Underneath these commodity-specific stories sits a labor story with an outsized effect on Latino communities. An estimated two-thirds or more of the U.S. agricultural workforce is foreign-born, and research from the National Immigration Forum has linked a shrinking supply of immigrant farm labor to upward price pressure across meat, poultry, eggs, dairy and produce alike.
