If you had to guess the most stolen food in American grocery stores, what would you say? Candy bars? Energy drinks? Maybe those little sushi trays that cost way too much? The actual answer is something you probably have sitting in your fridge right now, and grocery chains are losing billions because of it.
It’s Meat. Specifically, the Expensive Stuff.
According to multiple reports from retailers across the country, meat has consistently topped the list of the most shoplifted food items in the United States. Not ground beef. Not chicken thighs on sale. We’re talking about the premium cuts: filet mignon, lamb chops, Angus ribeyes. The stuff that makes your receipt look like a car payment.
This isn’t exactly new information to anyone who works in grocery loss prevention, but the scale of it keeps growing. Meat accounts for over 20% of grocery shrink (the industry term for inventory loss), and with grocery store profit margins already sitting at a razor-thin 1 to 3 percent, every stolen pack of steaks is a genuine financial blow.
Why Meat and Not Something Easier to Hide?
You’d think people would steal things that fit in a pocket. And sure, plenty of small items disappear from stores every day. But meat has a unique combination of qualities that make it a prime target. First, it’s expensive. A single package of good steaks can easily cost $20, $30, or more. Second, it’s always in demand. Everyone eats. Third, and this is the part most people don’t think about, stolen meat is easy to resell.
There’s an entire underground market for stolen meat. Small restaurants, corner stores, and individual buyers will purchase steaks and pork chops at a steep discount from someone selling out of a cooler in a parking lot. It sounds like something out of a comedy sketch, but it’s a massive, organized operation in many parts of the country.
This Isn’t Just Random People Pocketing a Steak
There’s a common image people have of shoplifting: a desperate person stuffing something under their jacket and walking out fast. And yes, that happens. But the meat theft problem in America is driven in large part by organized retail crime (ORC) rings. These are professional operations. They have teams, handlers, and distribution networks.
According to retail security research, ORC booster crews specifically target Walmart, Kroger, and Costco. They use distraction tactics, push carts loaded with unpaid steaks hidden under other items, and work in coordinated groups. Some operations near the U.S./Mexico border have been caught stealing bulk frozen meat for smuggling across the border. This is not petty crime. This is a supply chain.
U.S. retailers lose an estimated $45 billion in inventory to organized retail crime annually. That number is staggering, and meat is right at the center of it.
The Numbers Are Getting Worse
Shoplifting in America is not declining. According to national data, there were 1.15 million reported shoplifting cases in 2023, a 15% jump from the year before and the highest rate since 2019. Retailers reported a 93% increase in shoplifting incidents in 2023 compared to 2019. Stores are estimated to lose $47.8 billion to retail theft in 2025.
And here’s the kicker: stores only catch shoplifters about 2% of the time. The average shoplifter gets arrested once out of every 100 incidents. When you consider those odds, it becomes pretty clear why organized theft rings see grocery stores as easy targets.
In 2024, Kroger’s CFO publicly admitted that shrink was eroding the company’s profit margins by 15 to 20 basis points, and named fresh meat as a key driver. Target’s CEO said theft surged past $700 million in shrink in 2023, with meat among the hardest hit categories. These aren’t small mom-and-pop stores complaining. These are the biggest retailers in the country saying they’re bleeding money.
Self-Checkout Made Everything Worse
It would be hard to talk about grocery theft without bringing up self-checkout. Those machines were supposed to save retailers money on labor costs. Instead, they’ve become one of the biggest vulnerabilities in the store. Thefts at self-checkout counters have increased by 20%, and the reason is obvious: there’s nobody standing there watching you scan every item.
People “forget” to scan an item. They scan a cheap item and bag an expensive one. They put a steak through as bananas. The methods are endless, and without a dedicated employee at every register, it’s incredibly difficult to catch in real time. Walmart has cited self-checkout as a major factor in its shoplifting losses, and the issue contributed to the closure of 23 Walmart stores, including one in Washington state.
What About Cheese? Globally, It’s Actually Worse.
Here’s an interesting wrinkle. While meat is the most stolen food in the U.S., cheese is actually the most stolen food globally. About 4% of all cheese produced worldwide ends up stolen. If that percentage held true in the U.S. alone, it would equal roughly 508 million pounds of stolen cheese every year based on domestic production numbers.
Some of the cheese theft stories are wild. In 2019, police arrested two men who stole $50,000 worth of cheese from Leprino Foods (the world’s largest mozzarella manufacturer) in California. One of them worked at the plant. In 2011, two women walked into an Oregon Whole Foods, requested a box full of cheese, and one of them just walked out the door with $570 worth of Gouda and blue cheese.
Different countries have different theft profiles too. France and Canada’s most stolen food is cheese. Spain’s is olive oil. Germany’s is chocolate. Japan and South Korea? Cosmetics. According to compiled data from global sources, the U.S. and UK both land squarely on meat.
Other Foods That Disappear From Shelves
Meat might be number one, but it’s not alone. Baby formula is one of the most frequently stolen items in any grocery store, with a 3.1% theft rate. And contrary to what you might assume, most of it isn’t being stolen by parents who need to feed their babies. The baby formula black market is surprisingly profitable. It’s always in demand, and shady retailers are happy to buy it at a discount through gray market channels.
Alcohol is another big one. Nearly 3% of alcohol sold in the U.S. is stolen, the highest rate in the world. Brand-name liquor and imported wines are easy to resell because people know exactly what they’re getting. A stolen bottle of Hennessy sells itself.
Beyond food, Tide detergent, Gillette razors, and over-the-counter medications round out the most commonly stolen grocery store items. Tide is so frequently stolen it’s basically become a currency in some underground economies.
What Stores Are Doing About It
If you’ve noticed locked cases popping up in your local grocery store, now you know why. Retailers have started placing higher-priced meats behind glass cases that require staff assistance to open. Some stores have hired dedicated investigators whose entire job is to walk the meat section and watch for suspicious behavior.
But the problem with meat is that you can’t lock all of it up. Unlike cough medicine or electronics, meat needs to be accessible. People want to pick up a package, look at the marbling, check the weight. Putting every pack of chicken behind plexiglass would tank sales. So stores are stuck in a tough spot: make it too hard to buy and you lose customers, make it too easy to grab and you lose inventory.
Retailers spent approximately $12 billion on theft prevention measures last year. California launched a dedicated ORC crackdown that resulted in 29,060 arrests and $226 million in recovered stolen goods over two years. The FBI even released its first-ever flash mob shoplifting report in December 2025, documenting 3,321 incidents. More than 40% of the people arrested in those flash mob thefts were between 10 and 19 years old.
Why This Matters Even If You’ve Never Stolen Anything
Here’s the part that affects everyone. When a grocery store loses $1 million in stolen steaks, they don’t just absorb that loss and move on. With profit margins of 2 to 3%, the store would need to generate $30 to $50 million in additional sales just to recover that lost profit. That’s not realistic, so instead, prices go up for everyone.
A recent survey found that 23% of Americans admit to having shoplifted at some point, with 90% of recent offenders citing rising prices as their motivation. There’s a painful irony there. Theft drives prices higher, and higher prices motivate more theft. It’s a cycle that grocery stores, and their honest customers, are stuck in.
Food and grocery retailers lost over $4.5 billion to theft in 2025 alone. U.S. retailers overall lost $90 billion to inventory shrink. And 73% of that shrink is considered preventable, split between employee theft ($26 billion), inventory errors ($19 billion), operational mistakes ($12 billion), and organized retail crime ($9 billion).
So the next time you’re at the store wondering why a pack of ribeyes costs what it does, part of that price tag is covering the ones that walked out the door. The most shoplifted food in America is the same one most of us are trying to afford for dinner. And that reality isn’t changing anytime soon.
