The economy is pretty healthy by many measures, but the view from the checkout aisle at the grocery store hasn’t been so rosy—and President Joe Biden’s top economic advisor says food companies are partly to blame.

If you get a sense that you’re paying more to get the same food lately, economic data bears that out. Grocery prices rose 0.4% in January, the most in a year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday. And spending at grocery stores rose 0.6% in January from December, even as people pulled back their spending in other areas, the Census Bureau said Thursday in its monthly report on retail sales.

“Consumers are feeling that prices for everyday purchases are too high,” Lael Brainard, director of the National Economic Council at the White House said Thursday at a conference of the National Association for Business Economics in Washington.

She went on to highlight food company profit margins, repeating Biden’s recent attacks against corporate profits as a source of the high inflation that has battered household budgets since 2021. She noted that grocery prices rose after the pandemic disrupted supply chains, but that they’ve been slow to come back down after those supply chains were restored. 

She also blamed “shrinkflation” for consumers’ grocery store woes, echoing the comments Biden made in an advertisement broadcast during the Super Bowl, and said people are starting to alter their shopping habits in ways that might discourage companies from charging more or the same for less stuff.

“Certainly people are fed up with high prices,” Brainard told reporters at the conference. “The prices of the things that they buy on a weekly basis, groceries in particular, are not back to normal. And I think they're choosing to shop in different ways … that should help to pressure some margins and grocery prices to come down.” 

Correction, Feb. 26, 2024: This article has been updated to correct the title of Lael Brainard. The article was originally published Feb. 15, 2024.