Alexander Willis's piece for Raw Story is a roundup of other outlets' reporting: item-level price increases from Axios, a JPMorgan note reported by Mettis Global, and commodity prices from CNBC.1 The item-level figures are striking and, as far as we can tell, accurate: instant coffee up 15.8 percent year over year, tomatoes 12.8 percent, beef roasts 13.5 percent, apples 11.1 percent.1 Corn and wheat are at three-year highs after poor weather.1
The JPMorgan claim is the "report" in the headline:
JPMorgan "predicted that global food inflation would 'accelerate sharply into 2027,' growing from roughly 2.8% in the first half of 2026 to around 5% by the first half of next year."1
"Global food inflation" is a worldwide average, and the article never says the report applies to U.S. grocery prices at all.1 The forecast is a year out. And the phrase "already-inflated food costs" runs into the same government data every food story has to reckon with: the BLS reported food at home up 2.2 percent for the twelve months ending August, below the 3.4 percent rise in all items, with no change at all in August.2 Individual items like coffee and beef are up sharply; the basket is not.12
"GOP in trouble" appears nowhere in the JPMorgan forecast or the Axios reporting. It is the outlet's own political conclusion, placed at the front of the headline as though a bank had reached it.1
We flagged a right-leaning outlet this week for asserting that grocery bills are already painful when the data shows a flat month.2 This headline makes the same move from the other direction, and adds a partisan forecast on top. Both outlets had real material to work with, record diesel on one side and double-digit increases in coffee and beef on the other, and both chose headlines that claim more than their sources support. A reader who trusts either one comes away with a picture of grocery inflation that the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not recognize.