The average Thanksgiving Day meal in Missouri will cost $51.92 this year, or $5.19 a person, which is $1.40 more than last year's estimated price tag of $50.52.
Those figures come from the Missouri Farm Bureau, which had volunteers shop for ingredients at grocery stores across the state.
Although the contents of a Thanksgiving Day meal vary from family to family, the Farm Bureau's estimate included: one 16-pound turkey, two pumpkin pies, carrots, celery, cranberry sauce, whipped cream, rolls, sweet potatoes, stuffing and milk and coffee for beverages. Each meal was calculated to feed 10 people and include enough food for leftovers.
The bureau's Diane Olson says the cost of putting together a Thanksgiving Day meal held fairly steady, despite the slight uptick.
"Basically, we saw a few things go up, a few things go down, but overall it was a pretty level market basket survey," she said.
The average price for turkey is up slightly, from $1.24 cents a pound to $1.37 a pound, but that figure may drop as stores offer sales over the next few days.
"In Jefferson City, where I live, you can buy turkeys for 79 cents a pound," Olson said. "Then they've got all the special promotions (like) buy a ham, get a turkey free, that kind of thing … so there are a lot of different promotions going on that affect the price and actually have brought it down more."
Cranberry prices are averaging 27 cents more for a 12-ounce package this year than last, while a gallon of milk, on average, is 70 cents cheaper this year.
Farm Bureau figures also show the national average price of a Thanksgiving Day meal this year to be $50.11, or $5.01 a person, which is slightly higher than last year's national average of $49.41. This year's national estimate is also 18 cents cheaper than this year's Missouri average.
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