The analysis challenges current media headlines and shows that open access to online information benefits everyone.
Vilnius, Lithuania, July 2, 2026. – As Americans prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of independence, Oxylabs, a web intelligence company, put another type of freedom to work – leveraging publicly accessible data to help people understand the cookout economy.
Using the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) database, Oxylabs researchers tracked every major item of the cookout basket from January 2016 through April 2026: ground beef, buns, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, sausages, ketchup, and soft drinks. All prices were adjusted to 2026 dollars using the Consumer Price Index.
Open Data, Clearer Affordability: The Cookout as an Economic Portfolio
In April 2026 a record 55% of Americans said their financial situation was getting worse. Headlines warn of double-digit price spikes on cookout staples. But when Oxylabs used publicly available government data to analyze inflation-adjusted prices and the share they take from weekly paychecks, a different situation came into view.
The cookout basket for one (a burger, a hot dog and a soft drink) costs 11% more than in 2016 in real terms. Ground beef is up 32% in real terms, but cheese and tomatoes are down 17–18%, naturally hedging the basket.
“Consumers focus on the sticker shock of a single ingredient, but the public data tells a more accurate story. The cookout is an economic portfolio. When you track the entire basket over a decade, you realize that diversification is the consumer’s best defense against inflation,” said Marija Gecaitė, Chief Commercial Officer at Oxylabs.
Same Share of Median Paycheck as in 2016
The relationship between the prices of ingredients and what a typical worker earns reveals the real affordability of the American cookout. To measure true purchasing power, Oxylabs calculated the inflation-adjusted cost of a single-person cookout basket against median weekly earnings from 2016 to 2026.
In April 2026, a cookout for four costs approximately $29, while a cookout for twelve is about $88. The latter equals roughly 2.9 hours of work at the median wage, or less than half a day’s pay.
After ten years marked by food price volatility due to a variety of national and global events, the typical American worker still has the same purchasing power when it comes to the July 4th cookout.
“The affordability debate is too binary, and the real picture has been sitting in public databases all along. The stability Americans enjoyed in the late 2010s has been replaced by a more fragile reality, leaving them more exposed to price spikes. This is exactly the kind of insight – understanding where people stand – that public data can provide. It really shouldn’t require a Wall Street subscription,” said Gecaitė.
The full report can be accessed here.
About the Expert
Marija Gecaite is Chief Commercial Officer at Oxylabs, a web intelligence platform that delivers automated public data pipelines for enterprise and AI applications. A commercial strategy expert with a decade of experience across wealth management and cybersecurity, she previously led international sales organizations and now focuses on driving long-term global growth.
About the Oxylabs Research Team
Oxylabs Research is the research and storytelling team at Oxylabs. We use ethical, compliant Oxylabs scraping tools to collect only publicly available web data – never private, paywalled, or personal data – and turn it into clear, timely insights that help everyone make sense of a fast‑changing technological, economic, and social reality. Our work is designed to support original reporting and analysis by journalists and to serve the broader public good. If you’re working on a story or investigation and need reliable web data to back it up, get in touch at press@oxylabs.io.
About Oxylabs
Established in 2015, Oxylabs is a web intelligence platform and premium proxy provider, enabling companies of all sizes to utilize the power of big data. Constant innovation, an extensive patent portfolio, and a focus on ethics have allowed Oxylabs to become a global leader in the web intelligence collection industry and forge close ties with dozens of Fortune Global 500 companies. Oxylabs was named Europe’s fastest-growing web intelligence acquisition company in the Financial Times FT 1000 list for several consecutive years. For more information, please visit: https://oxylabs.io/
