BUSINESS WATCH:

With food prices soaring nationwide, Patrice Apodaca has learned to get creative when she goes grocery shopping.

The Newport Beach resident, who shops for her family every week, used to pile her cart with mangoes and blueberries, but has laid off some of the produce lately as the price tags grow steeper. She used to do a good deal of her shopping at Trader Joe’s, which offers cheaper costs than many other supermarkets, but now shops there almost exclusively.

And she’s grateful that, while milk and produce get less and less affordable, the cost of dry noodles hasn’t skyrocketed too much.

“I’m cooking a lot of pasta now,” Apodaca said. “It’s my new best friend. It’s cheap and it’s filling, and thank God my family likes it.”

Over the last 12 months, the cost of groceries has risen across America more sharply than in any year since 1990, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Price tags have increased due to growing worldwide demand for meat and dairy products, weather conditions that have hindered crop production, and other factors. To Apodaca and other shoppers around Newport-Mesa, that means keeping a closer eye on the checkbook.

Patrick Jackman, an economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said between November 2006 and November 2007 — the most recent month for which numbers were available — grocery prices had gone up 5.4% nationwide and 5.1% in Southern California. The last time prices had risen that sharply in the region, he said, was in 2003, when they shot up 6.1% from the year before.

Spokespersons for Albertsons, Vons and other supermarkets could not provide figures for how much their prices had gone up in the last year, but food buyers around town, from the Newport-Mesa Unified School District to the Someone Cares Soup Kitchen, said they were feeling the strain.

Shannon Santos, the executive director of Someone Cares, said the kitchen got most of its food donated but still spent about $800 a week on groceries. In the future, she expected to rely on donations more.

“Our eggs and our milk, we’re paying top dollar for those,” Santos said.

Dick Greene, the school district’s nutrition services coordinator, said grocery bills had risen so much that Newport-Mesa increased the cost of school lunches this year from $2.50 to $2.95. In addition, he said, the district required that vendors establish set prices for food at the start of the year so the district wouldn’t have to pay more with inflation.

Greene couldn’t speculate whether Newport-Mesa would hike its lunch prices again for the 2008-09 school year, but either way, he expected food costs to rise again when the district took bids in the spring.

“We’re fastening our seat belts,” he said.

MICHAEL MILLER may be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at [email protected].