NEW YORK >> With Thanksgiving less than two weeks away, Walmart, Target, Aldi and other grocers are competing for a place on holiday tables with turkey dinner deals and other promotions to tempt Americans who haven’t recovered from recent food price inflation.

Walmart, the nation’s largest food retailer, first bundled the makings of a traditional turkey feast into a meal deal three years ago. This year, the 29-item offer, which includes a frozen turkey and ingredients for side dishes, costs less than $55 and is intended to serve eight. That calculates to less than $7 per person.

Target’s version for four people costs $20, $5 less than the company’s 2023 Thanksgiving meal, and includes a frozen turkey, stuffing mix and canned green beans and canned jellied cranberry sauce. Aldi’s offers a frozen Butterball turkey with gravy mix as well as pumpkin ingredients for pumpkin pie and ingredients for side dishes such as sweet potato casserole. The German-owned supermarket chain priced it for $47 and said that was less than it charged for the same items in 2019.

Meijer, with more than 500 supercenters in the Midwest, jumped into the fray last week by offering a frozen turkey for 49 cents per pound or lower and a $37 Thanksgiving family meal for a group of four to six.

Comparing the respective menus to determine which represents the best value is difficult since recommended serving sizes and contents vary. But the promotions, introduced earlier than ever and at a time when many households remain put off by higher prices, underscore the importance of Thanksgiving to grocers, analysts said.

While consumer perceptions of grocery prices is based on the cost of staples such as eggs and milk, “the Thanksgiving meal has become essentially a new benchmark,” Jason Goldberg, chief commerce strategy officer at Publicis Groupe, a global marketing and communications company.

It’s the occasion for the second-largest holiday meal for retailers behind the feasts that accompany the winter holidays. Compared with an average, Thanksgiving meal shopping delivered a $2.4 billion sales lift during the week before and after the holiday last year, market research firm Circana said. Shopping for Christmas, Hanukah and New Year’s Day meals gave stores a $5.3 billion sales uplift compared with an average week, Circana said.

Walmart launched its offer Oct. 14, two weeks earlier than last year and plans to make it available through Dec. 24. The two bundles the retailer offered last year contained different items, but Walmart said this year’s selected products cost 3.5% less.

Joan Driggs, a Circana vice president, expects shoppers to buy items on sale for half of what they need to prepare Thanksgiving dinner meal. That’s double the amount from 2022, when retailers pulled back on promotions due to limited supplies left over from the coronavirus pandemic.

Consumers still aren’t seeing discounts as deep as the ones grocers trotted out in pre-pandemic 2019, Driggs said. To attract customers, retailers therefore are creating strategies such as meal bundles, which may “lessen the stress” for shoppers since they show the cost per person, she said.

Angel Rosario-Sanchez, 24, a New Jersey resident who was at a Walmart store in Secaucus on Wednesday, said he planned to have Thanksgiving with his friends but had not shopped for groceries yet. Seeing the big displays of Thanksgiving products in the store made him want to return to buy some.

“I always count on Walmart for deals,” said Rosario-Sanchez, who usually selects food from Walmart’s lower-end, Great Value brand. “Inflation is too much, and it needs to go back to where it originally was.”

For the past two years, Walmart, Target and others have seen price-conscious shoppers shift more of their purchases to store label brands. In response, retailers have improved their selections or created new food lines brands.