The current administration is bragging about how the price of a Walmart Thanksgiving dinner package has gone down this year. You probably have read about it. Here’s the thing, though. Two things, actually.
- The size of the meal has decreased
- The size of the turkey has decreased
One might call this deceptive advertising, but it really is deceptive economics. Focusing on the price while hiding changes to the Thanksgiving dinner bundle creates an image that is far from the truth.
I also have a third wish bone to pick with this whole exercise:
- More ingredients are now ultra-processed, packaged, and unhealthy.
A Smaller Thanksgiving Dinner
Let’s start with the first lie. Here are the numbers:
- 2024 Package: Has a total cost of $56 and serves 8 people at a cost per person of under $7.
- 2025 Package: Has a total cost of under $40 and serves 10 people at a cost per person of under $4.
A Catch in the Details
The 2025 package sounds like a better deal, right? But a catch is hiding in the difference between face value and the total package.
The 2024 package covered 29 individual items across 21 ingredients. It also included more brand-name staples and cooking staples.
The 2025 package covers 22 individual items across 15 ingredients. Those ingredients have also shifted from produce like real potatoes toward Walmart’s Great Value (store-brand) products. This year’s bundle dropped several side dishes and desserts found in 2024’s version. It focuses on cheap components like stuffing, potatoes, canned vegetables, and gravy while eliminating some critical ones such as flour, sugar, butter, eggs, apple cider and whipped cream.
The result? You get less for your money and feed those extra two people with less variety and more empty calories.
Not Such a Big Bird
Now let’s get to the heart of the meal: the Thanksgiving turkey. Once again, you have to pay attention to the details to understand the sleight of hand going on here.
In 2024, the Walmart package centered on a whole frozen turkey of 10 to 16 pounds at a cost of $0.88 per pound. This year the package includes a Butterball turkey of 13.5 pounds at $0.97 per pound. Unit pricing on this most-important item shows that once again you’re paying more for less. In fact, a 16-pound turkey at $0,97 a pound costs $15.52
You can blame the avian flu for the price increase. The American Farm Bureau Federation links the current price to the “highly pathogenic avian influenza.” The American turkey flock has dropped to its lowest size in 40 years. Because of supply and demand, wholesale turkey prices have shot up by 75% since October of 2024.
Ultra-processed Ingredients
Finally, we get to the third point: using instant and ultra-processed ingredients to “save” money. Let me say that I cook from scratch and some of the “traditional” dinner components never appear on my holiday table. For example, I don’t serve macaroni and cheese, green-bean casserole with fried onions, or sweet potatoes with marshmallow on Thanksgiving. I don’t mean to criticize people who do: regional specialties and ethnic foods play a big role in what appears in anyone’s meal.
But I do make mashed potatoes and I would not think of replacing the real thing with dried instant flakes. I also make a French Canadian meat stuffing instead of using bread and I cook it from scratch. For side dishes, I opt for a healthier offering of mashed carrots and turnips to anything with marshmallows on top. (Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Use lots of butter.)
Much of these differences come from my mother, who tried to feed us healthy food by reducing the amount of fat and sugar in her cooking. Tradition means you like what you ate when you were growing up and I grew up in a French Canadian home.
Aggressively Engineered Ingredients
Stuffing Mixes: When comparing the two stuffing mixes, I found a toss-up with Walmart’s Great Value mix coming out slightly better than Stove Top Stuffing Mix. By that I mean very slightly. Both mixes come loaded with ultra-processed ingredients and additives including flavor enhancers, preservatives, and synthetic colorants. Buy either one and you’ll get a load of monosodium glutamate, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, high-fructose corn syrup, and TBHQ. Yum.
Turkey Gravy: Because I couldn’t compare a house brand with an unspecified brand name product, I compared the gravies. To my surprise, the Great Value gravy had fewer additives and complex ingredients that you won’t find in any cook’s kitchen.
Both are shelf-stable products but Heinz uses more “complex flavor systems” (multiple yeast derivatives, meat powders) and includes milk-based ingredients.
Great Value relies on simpler thickeners and fats, but still includes synthetic flavor enhancers and caramel color. So either way, be prepared to slather your mashed potatoes with autolyzed yeast extract, disodium inosinate & guanylate, or modified food starch. Burp.
My Recommendation for Thanksgiving Dinner
So there you have it. Look behind the administration’s deceptive curtain and you’ll see they’re touting a smaller dinner package that is missing some crucial ingredients, in smaller quantities, and with a load of ultra-processed ingredients.
If you need to trim your dinner expense, I recommend that you drop a side dish or two, cook with natural ingredients like real potatoes, make your own gravy, and don’t forget the pie! With real whipped cream.
