The Game Day Grocery Index

What's in the game-day basket

The headline basket holds its mix constant: ground beef, chicken legs, American processed cheese, two 16-ounce bags' worth of potato chips, 24 12-ounce cans of soda, tomatoes, iceberg lettuce, and chocolate chip cookies. The chicken component is BLS chicken legs, bone-in; it is not presented as chicken wings. In September 2026, the fixed basket came to $61.58, down 0.5% from the prior month and up 0.7% from a year earlier. The largest line is soda at $14.18, while the smallest is lettuce at $1.64. Over the past year ground beef moved most, up 7.4%.

Methodology. This index uses the 8 tracked groceries above at fixed quantities and the BLS U.S. city-average source-unit prices. It is not a survey, and the BLS average-price series are not seasonally adjusted. For every fixed seasonal index, each target month uses the latest real BLS observation published at or before that month. If an item is not published for the target month, its raw series remains unavailable while the unchanged prior value is carried forward only in the derived seasonal basket, with its series ID, value, source month, and target month disclosed. No price is estimated or interpolated. Line items are rounded to the nearest cent for display while the total is summed from unrounded BLS prices, so the column can differ from the total by a cent. Quantity changes are versioned methodology events (see methodology and corrections).