Trump says it will be 'hard' to bring down grocery prices

President-elect Donald Trump is acknowledging it may be difficult to bring down grocery prices, despite making it a key tenet of his presidential campaign.

But in an interview with Time magazine, which named him person of the year for 2024, Trump said he nevertheless believes it'll happen through lower energy costs and supply chain improvements.

Asked whether his presidency would be a "failure" if grocery prices don't come down, Trump responded it would not, while blaming the current administration for the way it handled inflation that led to higher food prices in the first place.

"Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard," he said in the interview published Thursday.

"But I think that they will. I think that energy is going to bring them down. I think a better supply chain is going to bring them down. You know, the supply chain is still broken. It’s broken," Trump said.

Trump has promised to further increase American energy production. It is currently already at all-time highs.

He also did not specify how he would fix any supply chain issues, pivoting instead to complaints about the Biden administration's incentives for electric vehicles.

In fact, experts say Trump's much-talked-about tariffs proposals would likely exacerbate supply chain woes. It already happened during Trump's first administration, when ocean container shipping market rates spiked more than 70% in 2018 after he announced new tariffs, according to Reuters.

“Trump’s import tariffs are ‘history repeating’ and will cause a spike in ocean container shipping markets — with consumers picking up the cost,” Peter Sand, chief analyst at the shipping pricing platform Xeneta, told Reuters in September.

Food prices have indeed soared since the onset of the Covid pandemic in the spring of 2020, rising 23% overall during that period, much of which has coincided with President Joe Biden's tenure in the White House.

However, the pace of price growth has slowed dramatically over the past year and is now less than 2%. A host of factors are responsible for the slowdown, including the very ones Trump is counting on: At about $3 a gallon, gasoline prices have returned to multiyear lows and could decline further following an announcement from OPEC this week cutting its world oil demand forecast.

Agricultural import price increases have also moderated this year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, alongside container shipping costs that have come down since surging over the summer, according to Xeneta.

Still, food price growth is notoriously volatile and many factors that determine costs are often outside the government's control. Egg prices, for example, are once again on the rise, mostly the result of surging demand on reduced supplies due to avian flu.

Yet another of Trump's proposals would likely result in putting additional upward pressure on food costs: deportations. Asked by Time reporters about this issue, Trump again demurred, stating he would still allow some migrants to enter legally but not ones from "jails."

In fact, most farmworkers, even if undocumented, are nevertheless able to obtain work permits once they enter the United States. Crop owners are not taking any chances and are warning about the impact on food prices in the event of reduced worker pools.

“If we have labor shortages, and we can’t get our crops picked and sent to market, it could have an impact at the grocery shelves,” Joe Del Bosque, CEO of Del Bosque Farms in central California, told NBC News Los Angeles last month. “There could be less fruits or vegetables in the produce area and it could drive prices higher.”