Photo by Gary Kramer, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service. Licensed under Public domain. Rice harvest in Northern California, October 4, 2011. Resized for web.
A Dollar Off the Rice Bag Ends on Thursday
Among households whose grocery bill changed because of prices, most are shopping the sales. Southern California 99 Ranch has a 15-pound bag of Nishiki at $13.99 through October 15, down from $15 on the same panel. At the mill, that kind of California rice already costs more than it did last October.
October 15, 2026
The dollar comes off in yellow type. A 15-pound bag of Nishiki, a California medium-grain rice, is $13.99 on the Southern California 99 Ranch sheet through October 15. The same panel still shows $15 with a line through it. The footer leaves out the Westwood store, and it says quantities are limited.
That dollar is what the sheet gives back. In January, the food-waste group ReFED and the pollster YouGov asked 1,000 U.S. households about the grocery bill. Fifty-eight percent said they were spending more than a year earlier. Among the 632 whose bill had changed and who blamed food prices, 84 percent said they were looking for sales more often, and 61 percent said they were buying bigger packages to bring down the price per unit. ReFED, citing the Bureau of Labor Statistics, put grocery prices roughly 30 percent above where they stood in early 2020.
The bigger package is on the same sheet. A 50-pound sack of the store’s jasmine rice is $46.99, about 94 cents a pound, on the dry-grocery page dated October 2 through October 15. The Nishiki bag works out to about 93 cents. Jasmine is the fragrant long grain. Nishiki is the medium grain a Taiwanese bowl usually takes. For one week, in these stores, the two bags cost almost the same per pound.
The households in the survey put the extra grocery money at about $50 a week. ReFED says that number is what people remember. It runs ahead of what spending diaries usually record. The official index is calmer than the memory. In September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said grocery prices were up 1.8 percent from a year earlier, and down a tenth of a percent from August. Gasoline rose 9.1 percent in the month. The pump is the loud bill. The rice moved on a quieter one.
What the mill is charging
USDA’s Weekly National Rice Summary, dated October 8, puts California medium-grain white rice at $36 to $38 per hundred pounds for the week of October 5. For the week of October 6, 2025, the range was $32 to $35. The quote was steady from the week before. The agency skipped October 12 for the federal holiday. The next report is October 19.
That is the price at the mill, for U.S. No. 1 rice, before the bag, the truck, and the store. Thirty-six dollars per hundred pounds is 36 cents a pound as the rice leaves the mill. The sale tag is 93 cents. The rice inside that bag already costs more at the mill than it did last October.
The rest of this week’s Southern California sheet expires on its own clock. Chicken leg at $1.09 a pound was Friday through Sunday, October 9 to 11, and that price is already over. Green papaya at 89 cents a pound, and head-on white shrimp in the 30/40 size at $3.99 a pound, last through Thursday, on this region’s page. Texas and several East Coast stores are on sheets dated through October 16.
Thursday is the last day of the dollar. After that, the crossed-out $15 is the number printed next to the bag, until a new sheet says otherwise. The mill quote does not reset on Friday.