See the cost of milk, eggs, beef and more

As inflation hits supermarkets, you've probably noticed that your regular grocery shopping has gotten more expensive. The Globe, in partnership with market research firm Datasembly, tracks prices of grocery store staples in the Boston area. Each month, we update prices on everyday items and track trends over time. The tracker below also provides a city-by-city comparison of grocery prices in dozens of categories.

Here is an overview of the current prices of common products in local supermarkets:

An index is a useful way to establish a standard of comparison for different data points over time, taking into account factors that might otherwise make comparison difficult (such as the difference in price between a bag of sandwich buns and a loaf of bread). An index normalizes a data set and allows us to rate of change and not of actual change in values.

The following diagram shows a price index developed by Data assembly to easily compare the prices of different categories of grocery products over time, so we can see which categories are rising or falling the fastest in different U.S. cities. Use the dropdown menu to compare different categories of food.

Swipe to view other cities' data

The Globe analyzed data from Datasembly, a company that collects price data from real supermarkets in the United States.

The rise of online grocery shopping means unprecedented access to hyperlocal, hyper-specific pricing data, said Ben Reich, co-founder and CEO of Datasembly. Datasembly focuses on sellers that guarantee prices are the same online and in-store, he said. Datasembly pulls its product prices from grocers' websites and averages them.

To create the food price index, the company compares its product data with a baseline database collected in October 2019, which allows comparison over a certain period of time and across different products or regions.

The index is an attempt to “quantify the intuition about how things change,” Reich said.