Your Thanksgiving turkey is priced below wholesale on purpose

The Sunday Teardown · Thanksgiving

In the USDA's grocery ad survey released November 6, 9,794 stores advertised a conventional frozen whole turkey under 16 pounds, at an average of $1.19 a pound. The same week, the USDA's wholesale report quoted frozen hens at $1.81 a pound. A store selling a 15 pound bird at the ad price takes in about $9.30 less than that bird would fetch on the wholesale market, and it is doing it in a year when the USDA describes supplies of whole birds as tight. On September 30, U.S. cold storage warehouses held 195.8 million pounds of whole turkeys, the lowest September 30 figure in USDA records, which start in 2001.

Nobody in the meat department made a mistake. The turkey in the weekly ad is priced under the wholesale market by design, and the people who sell it say so on the record. In 2009 a Kroger meat merchandiser put it plainly to a reporter: "We sell it below cost." Last November the president of the National Turkey Federation told Axios the bird is "kind of the loss leader on the Thanksgiving table." The store is using the turkey to win your Thanksgiving trip, on the bet that a family who picks up the bird there will buy much of the rest of the meal in the same cart.

Last week I promised to take the Thanksgiving table apart one package at a time, and the bird is where that has to start. This week I'll go through what a $1.19 turkey is, why the store can afford to price it that way, and how a plant has it in the freezer months before the holiday. Then I'll open the packages that ride home with it: the stuffing, the gravy, the soup for the green beans, the fried onions and the crescent rolls. Read those labels next to the bird's and one pattern holds the whole issue together. The turkey in the ad is the cheapest whole bird in most stores this month, and the packages around it that taste of turkey cost 2.5 to 4.4 times as much per pound.

Nearly every turkey in a grocery store is the same breed, the Broad Breasted White, raised for its breast meat. The hens reach market weight in about 14 weeks at roughly 15 pounds, and hens are the birds most often sold whole. The toms grow for about 18 weeks, to about 38 pounds, and many of them become deli meat, ground turkey and cutlets. A whole turkey under about 16 pounds is usually a hen. Bigger birds are usually toms, and on September 30 cold storage held 121.4 million pounds of whole toms and 74.4 million pounds of whole hens.

You are also buying a solution. A frozen Butterball "contains up to 8% of a solution of water, salt, spices, and natural flavor." The Publix store brand contains up to 8% of a solution of turkey broth, salt, sodium phosphate and flavorings, and the Jennie-O Tender & Juicy bird lists about 9.5%. The salt seasons the meat and helps it hold water, and in the birds that list sodium phosphate, the phosphate adds to that effect. The USDA allows phosphates in poultry to cut the juices lost in cooking. Together they make a basted bird more forgiving of overcooking than a plain one. That solution is weighed and priced with the turkey. At $1.19 a pound, a bird with the full 8% pays about 9 cents of every pound for the solution.

Until 2016, the federal rule for a bone-in bird labeled basted was written around added solution of about 3% of the raw weight, and birds with more than that were sold under USDA policy guidance with a qualifying statement on the label. A rule published at the end of 2014 replaced both, effective in 2016. Today any raw bird with added solution has to state the percentage as a number in the product name and list what the solution contains, whatever the amount. The name has to be printed in one type style and color, with lowercase letters at least a third the size of the largest letter. I think it is the most useful line on a turkey label.

The other words on the bag are precise. "Fresh" means the bird's internal temperature has never gone below 26°F. "Frozen" means it has been at or below 0°F, and the label has to say so. A bird held somewhere between those temperatures needs no description at all. Federal rules require a plant to bring the center of a frozen bird to 0°F within 72 hours of putting it in the freezer, and a turkey kept frozen stays safe indefinitely. Food safety agencies give it a year for best quality. Butterball tells customers its frozen birds keep for up to 2 years.

The USDA's own economists have measured the discount. From January 2014 through September 2017, the markup from wholesale to retail on whole turkeys averaged 42%, and in November it averaged 13%. The pattern is not fixed. The same economists later found November markups of 70% or more in 2017 and 2018, when wholesale prices fell and retail prices did not follow. This year the ad price goes further and lands below wholesale, and the free turkey goes furthest. BJ's will give members a coupon for a Butterball worth up to $25 if they spend $150 in one transaction through November 9. Giant Eagle's threshold for a free store-brand bird runs through November 8 at $350, and ShopRite's is $400. One retailer's website lists its frozen store-brand turkey with the words "limit 1 at sale price" in the product name.

A store can do this because of what else is in the cart. Catalina, which tracks what shoppers buy at the register, found that carts with Thanksgiving items averaged $100.36 in the 2 weeks before the holiday in 2022. The average cart in those weeks came to $48.12. A cart with Thanksgiving items in it ran about twice the average.

Run the arithmetic on that 15 pound bird. The gap between the ad price and the wholesale market is about $9.30. Kroger reported a gross margin of 22.9% of sales for fiscal 2025, so a supermarket earning that rate covers the gap with about $41 of other groceries. The average Thanksgiving cart clears that more than twice over. Nobody has to mark up the stuffing. The store keeps an ordinary margin on everything else in the cart, and most Thanksgiving carts have plenty in them.

Three economists studied seven and a half years of scanner data from a large supermarket chain and found that prices tend to fall when demand for a product peaks, mostly because stores accept a thinner margin on it. Their working paper put it in one line: "it pays to deal tuna at Lent and turkeys at Thanksgiving." In November the bird is the item most shoppers are looking for, and a deep price on that item is how a store wins the trip.

So here is the question I want you to take into the second half. If the store will price the bird below the wholesale market to win the trip, what is it selling you in the rest of the cart? The answer is a lot of turkey flavor, and not much turkey.

Below the line for paid subscribers. I go through how a turkey plant has the Thanksgiving bird in the freezer months ahead, and why one of the country's biggest meat companies sold its whole-bird business this year. Then I open every package that rides home with the turkey, from the stuffing whose turkey is under 2% and the turkey gravy that starts with chicken stock to the cream of mushroom with less cream than salt and the "buttery" rolls with no butter. I price the turkey in the bird against the turkey in the box, show where the store's money comes from, and tell you what I'd buy.