We followed 3 shoppers to see how much they would save if Utah dropped its grocery tax

Zach Warner, 40, calls himself “a stickler for finding a good deal” as he gets groceries for himself, his wife and their two young children, while hunting and gardening to stretch their budget.

Penny Paxman, 58, relies on disability benefits from Social Security — so except for an occasional box of cookies, crackers or macaroni and cheese, she typically buys fresh food that she cooks herself.

And since Scott Johnson, 52, lost his job a year ago, he’s been going to multiple stores and using tools such as digital coupons to save money when he shops to feed the seven people in his household.

Lawmakers have repeatedly tried to court Utahns like these with proposals to drop the state sales tax on food. Although the most recent plan — tied to the now-disqualified Amendment A ballot measure — has been dropped, the idea will likely pop up as a carrot for voters again.

But these shoppers — and anyone else who buys groceries in Utah — would see only negligible changes to their grocery bills, according to analysis of their grocery receipts by The Salt Lake Tribune.

Consumers currently pay 3% in sales taxes on grocery food in Utah: 1.75% is levied by the state, and 1.25% is charged by local governments.

If the state portion is ever erased, Commissioner Rebecca Rockwell with the Utah State Tax Commission explains, “expectations need to be clear” that the food tax will not go down to zero. The 1.25% paid to city and county governments will remain.

And there are other complexities: Not all food is taxed at the so-called “grocery” rate of 3%. Some items are taxed at the higher sales and use tax rate, which varies according to which city you live in. In Salt Lake City, for example, the combined sales and use tax rate is 7.75%, according to the latest Sales and Use Tax Act rates.

Zach’s grocery bill: $91.84

When Zach Warner, a gastroenterologist living in Millcreek, is shopping for his family of four, he usually tries to find a protein that’s on sale, he said — and then finds things to “mix and match” to go with it, like salad or broccoli.

On a recent shopping trip to a Smith’s in Millcreek, he bought pork chops and chicken thighs, but not the steak he was craving because he decided it was too expensive.

He also bought corn and other vegetables, cheese crackers and a couple of Lunchables for his kids’ lunches. He picked up a few kinds of cereal (“We’ve always got to keep that stocked up”), as well as blueberries and grapes for his kids to snack on.

When he finds a good deal on a type of protein, he sometimes seasons it and vacuum packs it; when he’s ready to use it, he’ll sous vide it in a hot water bath. That way he can “bank the savings for another day,” he said.

“I think we’re all taking a big, big hit to the pocketbook when we’re trying to plan for dinner,” Warner said.

Meat has become so pricey, he said, that he often doesn’t buy it in a grocery store. Instead, he’ll hunt deer, which he’s been doing since he was young, growing up outside St. George. Then he’ll have the meat processed into hamburger or sausage, which he said he can use in a lot of different recipes. Or he’ll hunt an elk, and divide the meat between a couple of families.

Hunting is “very quintessential Mountain West for a lot of people,” Warner said, but when he moved up to Salt Lake City for college, “people thought that was kind of strange.”

Warner said he has “a lot of family friends who raise cattle,” so for the last eight or nine years, his family has gone in on a whole cow with friends and family at the beginning of the year.

They also have a home garden, filled with leafy greens, beans, potatoes, tomatoes and squash, he said. He has some Japanese heritage, he added, and “it’s very much a cultural thing to have a lot of rice sitting around,” so he can always fall back on that to extend meals.

The state food tax on this trip: About $1.30.

That would’ve been a savings of about 1.5% if the grocery tax were eliminated, and the most he would’ve saved on any item is about 14 cents, or an average of 6 cents. There was a three-cent difference in our calculated tax and the tax on the receipt, despite multiple attempts to fix the discrepancy.

Penny’s grocery bill: $48.59

Penny Paxman, who lives in Midvale, shops for herself and her “roommate,” a cat named Bernie. Paxman can’t drive due to a traumatic brain injury she suffered in a fall in 2015, so she often walks to the grocery store, taking reusable grocery bags along and then ferrying her purchases back in a cat stroller that Bernie refuses to use.

With her income limited to Social Security benefits, she said, she tries not to spend more than $50 a week on food. She usually eats one full meal a day, she said, and otherwise snacks between meals.

Paxman goes to the store — “no more than once a week” — with a list ready, based on what she wants to eat. It takes her about 15 minutes to walk to a Winco near her in Midvale, where she recently spent $48.59 on hamburger patties, vegetables, butter, milk, Greek yogurt, cheese, deli turkey, two bagels from the bakery, some snacks from the bulk section, a bottle of naproxen and cat food.

In her home freezer, she had some homemade Asian noodles from the Downtown Farmers Market. She bought broccoli, carrots, a red bell pepper, mushrooms and a can of water chestnuts to make a stir-fry with them.

Knowing she had some hamburger buns in her freezer, she planned to use the fresh hamburger patties for a couple of meals, including crumbling some for taco meat. For tostadas, Paxman bought corn tortillas and two cans of black beans to make into refried beans.

This was a pretty typical grocery shopping trip for Paxman, she said. Sometimes she shops at a nearby Smith’s, “if they have something good on sale.”

Due to her health problems, Paxman now receives Social Security after nearly 30 years in the travel industry. The $1,748 a month covers her health insurance, subsidized rent, cable, internet, her cat’s pet insurance, her cellphone and her food. She looking for a part-time job, she said, to “get me out of the house and do things.”

She’s “always on a budget,” she said, and she doesn’t “eat out a lot.” (Food in a restaurant not only is taxed at the 7.75% rate, but there’s the state’s 1% restaurant tax on top of that.)

“I don’t do a lot of things, you know? I try to save that money,” Paxman said. However, she continued, “by no means am I suffering. I don’t want for anything.”

The state food tax on this trip: 70 cents.

That’s 1.45% of her total bill. If the grocery tax were eliminated, she’d save an average of 3 cents per item, and the most she’d save on any one item is about 14 cents.

Scott’s grocery bill: $77.46

Scott Johnson said that he and his family — his wife, four children and his oldest son’s girlfriend — used to be more “convenience-oriented” when shopping for food, because he had less time to shop for deals. His wife works full time as a nurse, he said, and his career has been in sales and marketing.

But he lost his job a little over a year ago. Now he’s in the midst of a “career transition,” he said, working various jobs and finding multiple sources of income while he works to complete a data analytics boot camp through UC Berkeley Extension.

With more time at home, he’s taking on duties like carpooling and preparing lunches for his two youngest children, ages 12 and 14. On a recent shopping trip to a Smith’s in Sandy, Johnson spent $77.46, focusing mostly on stocking up his family’s pantry during the store’s biannual case lot sale.

His purchases included a lot of condensed soups, canned chili and packets of ramen noodles, plus lasagna noodles, canned beans, frozen hamburger patties, canned pineapple, milk, sour cream, green onions, and five packages each of bagels and ground turkey, to put in the freezer.

His children would turn their noses up at turkey burgers, Johnson said, but if he mixes ground turkey into soups and other recipes, “they’re none the wiser.” And compared to beef, “it’s just a more economical way of getting a lean protein source,” he said.

Johnson said this trip to Smith’s was out of the ordinary for him, since it was more focused on dry goods; he more often grabs “the staples,” shopping around at different stores while he looks for the best deals.

His family lives equidistant to a Ream’s, a Smith’s, a Macey’s, a Walmart and a Harmons, he said, but he finds Harmons’ prices too high as he shops for seven people. He often will have apps for multiple stores open on his phone at the same time, he said, so he can compare prices with a few taps.

His knowledge of how to find good deals is informed by the time he spent working for such companies as PepsiCo, Dr Pepper and Kraft Heinz, he said.

“I’m probably more deal-sensitive just given our life stage right now, and also that I know all of this background industry knowledge that I feel like I know how to get the best deals, and save where I can,” he said.

The state food tax on this trip: $1.32.

That was 1.7% of the total. Without that tax, the most he would save on any item is 15 cents, or an average of 3 cents.

Taxing food vs. ‘non-food’

Due to the way Utah taxes food, all three shoppers saved themselves a bit of money by buying ingredients for meals they would make themselves.

Warner bought chicken thighs, for example, which are taxed as grocery food at 3%. If he had bought fried chicken from the deli section, it would have been taxed at the higher sales-and-use tax rate placed on prepared food — which is 7.75% in Salt Lake City.

In general, anything you’d have to prepare yourself, or that isn’t ready to eat as soon as it’s purchased, is taxed as grocery food. Anything that doesn’t provide nutritional value, or is ready to eat as soon as it’s purchased, is taxed as “non-food/prepared food.”

A flowchart on the Utah Tax Commission’s website demonstrates the complexity of the rules:

• If the item is not chewed or eaten for its taste or nutritional value (like Paxman’s naproxen or cat food) — or if it’s tobacco or alcohol — it’s taxed at the full rate.

• If the place selling the item doesn’t heat the food or sell it heated, or doesn’t mix two or more food ingredients and sell it as a single item, and doesn’t provide any type of utensil (including a napkin), the item is taxed at the reduced rate.

If the place does any of those things, the item could be sold at either rate — depending on whether the food is only cut, repackaged or pasteurized by the seller, and whether it contains raw animal products.

Jason Gardner, the spokesperson for the Utah State Tax Commission, summed it up like this: If you went into a convenience store and bought a bottled soda, that would be taxed according to the 3% rate, because you could take it home and put it in your fridge, and if you consumed it later, it would be in the same state as when you purchased it.

But if you went into that same store and got a fountain soda, with a lid and a straw, it would be taxed according to the higher rate, because it was sold in a “prepared state.”

‘Bad tax policy’?

Under Utah’s constitution, lawmakers can spend income tax revenue on public schools, higher education and services for children and adults with disabilities. Lawmakers want more flexibility to spend that revenue — which accounts for a quarter of the state’s $29.4 billion budget.

To help convince voters to lift the restriction, lawmakers tied the Amendment A ballot measure to amend the state constitution to a law that would have eliminated the state portion of the grocery sales tax.

That package deal is dead, for now: On Oct. 9, 3rd District Judge Laura Scott ruled that Amendment A was void because lawmakers didn’t post the ballot language in state newspapers two months ahead of the vote, as the state constitution requires. The amendment will appear on printed ballots, but votes for it will not be counted.

Whether Utah charges sales tax on food is “really the will of the Legislature,” said Gina Cornia, executive director of Utahns Against Hunger, a nonprofit that, according to its website, “works to increase access to food through advocacy, outreach and education.”

“If there was the will in the Legislature and leadership was behind it, they could do this legislatively,” Cornia told The Tribune. “They do not need to tie it to this larger change that they want to make.”

Cornia said she thinks the sales tax on food “is bad tax policy, and it disproportionately impacts low-income households.”

Cornia said she believes the food tax issue was coupled with Amendment A because legislators “know how popular removing the sales tax is. ... I think that they’re hoping that the sales tax on food issue would push [Amendment A] over the finish line.”

Rep. Judy Weeks Rohner, R-West Valley City, testified to a Utah Senate committee in February 2023 — as Amendment A was being proposed — that “Utahns have made it clear that removing the tax on food is a top priority. Rising costs of groceries and high inflation have impacted Utahns across the state.”

Economists estimate the state would give up roughly $200 million in revenue by eliminating the sales tax on food — money that would have been going into the state’s general fund. That’s significant, though it’s only 7/10ths of 1% of the entire state budget, which totaled just under $29.4 billion for the 2025 fiscal year.

The state, Rohner said in 2023, could only make up the money lost from repealing the grocery tax by amending the Utah Constitution to remove the restrictions on how income tax revenue is spent.

Opponents of Amendment A asked — in the words of Moe Hickey, executive director for Voices for Utah Children — “Why can’t [removing the sales tax on food] be a standalone action?”

At a September news conference with other groups against Amendment A, Hickey said the Legislature “could easily eliminate the sales tax on food. It’s actually disingenuous to put it in with this constitutional amendment, to get people to have to make a choice between the two issues.”

Will the Legislature try again?

The judge’s ruling to void Amendment A likely won’t be the last Utahns will hear of the proposal.

After the ruling, the leaders of the Utah Legislature — Senate President Stuart Adams and House Speaker Mike Schultz — issued a joint statement, in which they argued that “Amendment A would have constitutionally guaranteed funding for public education and removed the state sales tax on food. While votes on this amendment will not be counted, we remain committed to continue supporting education and lowering taxes for all Utahns.”

On the other hand, Rep. Carol Moss, a Democrat representing Holladay and nearby suburbs, said in a September interview that “the sales tax on food is a minimal amount, and that is not [worth] sacrificing our future education revenue [for]. … [The Legislature] could do that in a bill. They could do that some other way, if they cared about it. They just thought that would be a way to say, ‘Oh, but look what the public’s getting,’ and that would bring along a lot of the public.”

This isn’t the first time Utah politicians have floated the idea of eliminating the grocery tax to generate support for other tax policy changes.

In 2004, when he was running for governor, Jon M. Huntsman Jr. championed abolishing the sales tax on food, calling it “one of the most regressive taxes in our society. … It especially hurts seniors on fixed incomes and working families,” The Associated Press reported at the time.

Huntsman argued that Utah needed to change its tax structure “to broaden the tax burden,” he said — to reflect an economy that had moved away from mining and manufacturing and to service-oriented businesses.

As governor, in 2006 and 2007, Huntsman cut the state’s sales tax on food to its current rate, 1.75%.

— Salt Lake Tribune data reporter Megan Banta and education reporter Carmen Nesbitt contributed to this story.