FILE PHOTO: Butterball frozen turkey, part of Walmart's basket of Thanksgiving goods, is displayed for sale at a store in Valley Stream, New York, U.S., November 6, 2025. REUTERS/Kylie Cooper/File Photo

By Howard Schneider

(Reuters) -Deep discounting by U.S. retailers on turkeys pushed the cost of the traditional Thanksgiving dinner lower for a third straight year, while costs for side dishes highlighted the country's nagging debate over the cost of living.

The overall decline put the price of the meal at $55.18, 5% down from 2024, the lowest since 2021, driven lower by a 16.3% decline that shoppers found in what retailers were charging for a 16-pound turkey, the American Farm Bureau Federation reported in its annual survey of holiday meal prices.

But the overall price was still about 13% higher than what the bureau's "classic meal" - featuring turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, sweet peas, dinner rolls, pumpkin pie and other items - cost in 2019, during President Donald Trump's first term and before the COVID-19 pandemic and the relief efforts arising from it stoked a surge in inflation.

The details of the report and the Farm Bureau's analysis, moreover, showed price pressures still working through the food supply and demonstrated the tensions emerging in retail between increasingly price-sensitive consumers and companies fighting to keep market share amid rising costs.

Walmart, for example, touted its 2025 Thanksgiving meal basket for 10 at less than $4 per person, versus about $7 last year, but the company subbed out fresh stuffing ingredients for a mix and also featured nine of its in-house brand items, which helped lower costs. Walmart did sub in the well-known Butterball turkey, which is more expensive than the brand it used last year.

It was an example of what U.S. Federal Reserve officials and retail analysts say has become widespread behavior among cost-stretched households who are switching to store brands or moving to discounters like Walmart for the first time.

"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," the Farm Bureau said in a statement, with the cost of many traditional sides rising as farms dealt with "the continued shortage of farmworkers and rapidly increasing farm wages."

The Farm Bureau has estimated costs for the same Thanksgiving menu since 1986. Items like stuffing and dinner rolls were cheaper this year on the basis of lower wheat prices, while roughly half the foods for the meal increased in price from 2024, with frozen peas (+17.2%), sweet potatoes (+37%) and a fresh vegetable tray (+61.3%) notably more expensive than last year.

Federation president Zippy Duvall said food prices remain "a real concern for many families," and noted the loss of an estimated 15,000 family farms over the past year "because of factors including historically low crop prices, high supply costs and trade uncertainty, which continue to squeeze farmers and ranchers."

The Trump administration's immigration enforcement has fallen heaviest on Hispanic communities, a traditional source of farm labor, while its trade disputes with other countries led China to scale back its purchases of U.S. soybeans and slapped tariffs on many imported goods.

Food costs have become a major political issue in the U.S. as the Thanksgiving holiday approaches after a record-long government shutdown that disrupted air travel for weeks.

Trump campaigned on a pledge to lower prices. But it is unusual in the U.S. for overall prices to fall and inflation has proved sticky during his first months in office.

The Consumer Price Index in September, the latest data available owing to the shutdown, was running at 3.0% annually, the highest since January. The data shows a number of household food staples were up by the most in three years that month and more than half the items in the index were rising in price by more than 3%.

Feeling heat from households pinched by inflation, Trump last week rolled back the steep tariffs he had imposed on hundreds of different imported food items, including beef, bananas and coffee, after his Republican Party suffered losses in the first elections held since his return to the White House in January.

(Writing by Daniel Burns; Additional reporting by Howard Schneider and David Gaffen; Editing by Neil Fullick and Nick Zieminski)