If someone asked you to guess the most shoplifted food in America, you’d probably say something small and easy to pocket. Candy bars. Energy drinks. Maybe those little cheese rounds by the register. Something you can slip into a jacket without anyone noticing.
You’d be wrong. The most shoplifted food item in America is meat. And not just any meat. We’re talking premium cuts. Filet mignon. Angus ribeyes. Lamb chops. The stuff that rings up at $20, $30, sometimes $40 a package. It sounds almost absurd until you start looking at the numbers, and then it makes perfect, uncomfortable sense.
Why Meat, of All Things?
Meat accounts for over 20% of grocery shrink, which is the industry’s word for inventory that disappears without being paid for. That includes theft, errors, and spoilage, but theft is the big one. And when you think about it, the logic is simple. Meat is expensive, universally desired, and doesn’t have those bulky anti-theft tags you’d find on a bottle of Hennessy or a Dyson vacuum. A pack of ribeyes is flat, fits under a coat or inside a bag, and costs enough to make the risk feel worthwhile to someone desperate or entrepreneurial enough to try.
A recent survey found that 23% of Americans admit to having shoplifted at some point in their lives. Among recent offenders, 90% pointed to rising prices as their motivation. Grocery prices have climbed relentlessly over the past few years, and while a lot of items got more expensive, the meat section felt it the hardest. When a pack of steaks costs more than an hour of minimum wage work, some people just stop scanning it.
The Self-Checkout Problem
Self-checkout changed everything for grocery theft. Research from checkout technology firm Grabango found that self-checkout machines generate shrink at a rate of 3.5% of sales, which is more than 16 times the loss rate from traditional cashier lanes. Nearly 7% of self-checkout transactions showed some amount of “partial shrink,” meaning the customer paid for part of their stuff but not all of it.
The classic move is called the “banana trick.” You put a $28 pack of steaks on the scale, punch in the code for bananas, and pay $1.12 instead. Or you scan a cheap item but bag the expensive one. Or you just skip the scan entirely, placing the meat straight into the bag while the machine isn’t looking. Over 36 million Americans have stolen from a self-checkout kiosk, and 55% of those people say they plan to do it again.
Dollar General got so fed up that it pulled self-checkout from every single one of its stores starting in late 2024. The company’s CFO said shrink headwinds increased more than 100 basis points for the full year. That’s corporate speak for “we were bleeding money.”
This Is Not Random Shoplifting
Here’s the part that surprises most people. A huge chunk of meat theft isn’t hungry individuals pocketing a pack of chicken breasts. It’s organized. Like, genuinely organized crime.
They’re called “booster crews.” These are groups of professional shoplifters working under handlers, hitting multiple stores in a single day, sometimes traveling across state lines using rental cars and stolen identities. They target Walmart, Kroger, and Costco specifically, loading up carts with premium cuts of meat hidden under other items and walking right out the door.
The stolen meat gets resold. Small restaurants buy it. Corner stores buy it. Individual people buy it out of coolers in parking lots at half the retail price. Vice did reporting on heroin-fueled boosters who stole meat daily to fund their habits. On Reddit, you can find threads where people openly discuss buying stolen steaks from boosters like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
According to the National Retail Federation, retailers lost a combined $112 billion to shrink in 2022 alone. ORC (organized retail crime) is a massive piece of that. The NRF’s 2025 report found that 67% of retailers reported involvement from transnational ORC groups in thefts against their stores in the past year. This isn’t petty crime. It’s an industry.
The Math Is Brutal for Grocery Stores
Grocery stores operate on some of the thinnest profit margins in all of retail, generally between 1% and 3%. That means for every dollar you spend at the store, the store might keep two or three pennies in profit. Everything else goes to paying suppliers, employees, rent, utilities, and the hundred other costs of keeping a store open.
Now imagine someone walks out with $1 million worth of stolen steaks over the course of a year. With a 2 to 3% profit margin, that store would need to generate an additional $30 to $50 million in legitimate sales just to make up for that loss. That’s not a typo. Thirty to fifty million dollars in extra revenue to cover a million in stolen product. The math is punishing.
This is why you’ve started seeing security tags on steaks at some stores. Walmart and Kroger have begun tagging individual packages of ribeye. Sobeys in Canada started putting pork in locked plastic cages. It looks ridiculous, but when every stolen package is a direct hit to already razor-thin profits, you do what you have to do.
Stores Are Closing Because of This
The consequences go beyond lost product. According to a 2023 industry survey, 30% of retailers closed store locations specifically because of theft. Another 23% planned to close stores in 2024. And 65% of retailers have pulled specific products off their sales floors entirely to avoid having them stolen.
That creates a real problem for regular shoppers. When a grocery store in your neighborhood closes because theft made it unprofitable, you now have to drive further to get food. When stores lock up products or remove them from shelves, your shopping experience gets worse. When 64% of small businesses raise prices to compensate for shoplifting losses, everyone pays more. It’s a feedback loop. Prices go up, which motivates more theft, which drives prices up further.
America Is Unique in This
Here’s something interesting. Globally, the most stolen food item isn’t meat. It’s cheese. About 4% of all cheese produced worldwide ends up stolen, which would translate to roughly 508 million pounds of stolen cheese per year in the U.S. alone if we matched the global rate. France and Canada both list cheese as their top stolen food. Italy specifically loses the most Parmesan. Germany’s most stolen grocery item is chocolate. Spain loses olive oil. Russia and Mexico lose alcohol.
But in America, it’s meat. The U.S. and the UK are somewhat unique in that their most stolen food is premium cuts of beef and packaged meat. The reasons are cultural as much as economic. Americans eat more beef per capita than almost any other country, premium steak carries real status, and the underground resale market for stolen meat is well established.
In 2019, two men in California stole $50,000 worth of cheese from Leprino Foods, the world’s largest mozzarella manufacturer. So cheese theft certainly happens here too. But it’s the ribeyes and filet mignons that keep loss prevention managers up at night.
The Numbers Keep Getting Worse
Retailers reported a 93% increase in shoplifting incidents in 2023 compared to 2019. By 2024, shoplifting incidents jumped another 18% on top of that. The FBI released its first flash mob shoplifting report in December 2025, documenting 3,321 incidents, with more than 40% of those arrested being between the ages of 10 and 19.
Meanwhile, stores only catch shoplifters about 2% of the time. The average shoplifter gets arrested once out of every 100 incidents. Those are incredible odds if you’re someone deciding whether to walk out with a $35 pack of lamb chops.
Violence is increasing too. The NRF found a 17% increase in threats or acts of violence during shoplifting events between 2023 and 2024, and a 16% increase in incidents involving weapons. 73% of retailers said shoplifters exhibited heightened levels of aggression in 2024. Retail workers are dealing with more dangerous situations than ever, all over products that generate pennies of profit per unit.
Retail theft is projected to cost stores $47.8 billion in 2025, with losses potentially exceeding $55 billion by 2028. California alone launched an ORC crackdown that produced 29,060 arrests and $226 million in recovered stolen goods over two years. But it barely made a dent. The stolen steak economy keeps growing, and the people running it are getting more sophisticated, more aggressive, and harder to stop.
So the next time you’re in the meat aisle and notice a security tag on a pack of steaks, or the self-checkout lane has a new camera pointing directly at the scale, now you know why. That filet mignon isn’t just expensive. It’s the single most stolen food in the country.
