Officially, food inflation has cooled. Unofficially, almost nobody believes it at the checkout. Shoppers who watched the price of cheese, coffee and cooking oil climb steeply over the past few years now scan their receipts and wonder why the total refuses to come back down, even as headlines insist the worst is over. Both things can be true at once, and understanding why is the first step towards feeling less helpless about the weekly shop.
The short answer is that inflation measures the speed of price rises, not their direction. When inflation falls, prices are still rising — just more slowly. A loaf that jumped in price during the energy crisis does not drift back to its old level when the crisis eases; it simply stops climbing so fast. At Daily News Consumer, we have been tracking how households are responding to this new, permanently pricier normal.
Why the Numbers and the Receipts Disagree
National statistics tell a genuine story of cooling. The Office for National Statistics publishes detailed inflation data showing food price growth far below its peak, when some staples were rising at extraordinary annual rates. But averages hide the items people buy most often. We notice the price of milk, eggs and bread because we buy them weekly; we barely register that other goods in the basket have barely moved. Psychologists call this frequency bias, and supermarkets understand it well.
There is also the matter of pack sizes. Shrinkflation — the same price for a slightly smaller product — means the shelf label can look stable while the cost per hundred grams quietly rises. Add in the disappearance of the deep discounts many families relied on, and the lived experience of shopping diverges sharply from the headline rate. The prices feel stuck because, for the basket most households actually buy, they largely are.
What Is Still Pushing Costs Up
Food prices are built from layers of other prices: energy for greenhouses and factories, fertiliser, animal feed, transport, packaging and wages. Several of those layers remain expensive, and the Bank of England’s inflation explainer sets out how such costs feed through to households with long delays. Poor harvests linked to extreme weather have added further pressure on items such as cocoa, coffee and olive oil, where global supply is concentrated and slow to recover.
Supermarkets, for their part, operate on famously thin margins and face their own rising costs in staffing, logistics and energy. That does not mean shoppers should accept every increase uncritically — competition between chains is real, and the rapid growth of discount retailers shows how quickly customers move when they feel overcharged. But it does explain why few retailers are rushing to hand back the increases of recent years.
How Shoppers Are Fighting Back
The most striking change is behavioural. Loyalty schemes, once a mild discount, are now central to how many people shop, with member prices creating a two-tier shelf. Own-brand ranges have improved and gained loyal converts who discovered during the price shock that the cheaper version was often just as good. Batch cooking, strict lists, yellow-sticker hunting and swapping one expensive ingredient for a cheaper cousin have moved from frugal hobbies to mainstream habits.
Meal planning has also gone mainstream, with families checking cupboards before shopping, cooking once and eating twice, and treating the freezer as a financial tool rather than a graveyard for forgotten peas.
Perhaps the healthiest shift is scepticism. Shoppers increasingly compare unit prices rather than pack prices, keep a mental note of what staples should cost, and treat suspiciously round promotions with caution. The era of trusting the weekly shop to look after itself is over. For more consumer investigations and money-saving tests, see our latest coverage — your receipt will thank you.
