Fed's Kashkari gauges inflation by looking at Stouffer's product

Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, said in an interview with CNN on Tuesday that he gauges inflation and its impact on consumers by looking at the cost of a favorite family dinner item.

I pay attention to grocery prices. There is a large tray of lasagna that used to cost around $16. Now it is around $21, said Kashkari in reference to Stouffer's product. That is my little measuring stick of how inflation is going. Kashkari said the Fed will likely have to raise interest rates to push inflation down. The Fed recently hiked its benchmark short-term rate to 4.75%, but Kashkari said he d advocate for an eventual hike up to 5.4%. He said that I am a little bit on the higher end than some of my Fed colleagues.

Kashkari isn't the only one taking note of the higher price of the much-loved Stouffer's product, which comes in a variety of sizes and styles, and what it means in terms of the big economic picture.

One person tweeted last year that I gauged inflation based on Stouffer's frozen 4 meat lasagna.

MarketWatch reached out to Nestl NSRGY, the parent company of Stouffer s, for comment about pricing, but didn't receive an immediate response.

Most consumers have a key item or two in their supermarket basket that they track in terms of price changes, be it staples like bread and milk or a specialty product like frozen lasagna. The price of the popular McDonald's sandwich has been a subject of much attention, as a way to look at currencies, and the surge in egg prices last year was due to the avian flu. The publication stated that Burgernomics was never intended to be a precise gauge of currency misalignment.