New data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) has shown that the lowest-priced grocery items have increased in cost by around 17% over the 12 months to September 2022.
The data, based on web-scraped supermarket data for 30 everyday grocery items, saw the prices of 15 items rising by 15% or more.
Largest percentages
Vegetable oil showed the largest percentage increase and average price increase between April 2022 and September 2022, up by 46% (80p per litre) followed by chips (up 27p to £1.37 for 1.5kg) and milk (up 25p to £1.52 for four pints). In contrast, orange juice showed the largest decrease, falling by -8% (6p per litre) and beef mince (down 5p to £1.95 for 500g).
However, the items where the lowest prices rose at the fastest rate between September 2021 and September 2022 were vegetable oil (65%), Pasta (60%) and Tea (46%).
Several items including yoghurt and pizza had a very stable lowest price throughout the entire period.
Energy bills
The web-scraped data has been collected from seven grocery retailers: Asda, the Co-op, Iceland, Morrisons, Sainsbury's, Tesco and Waitrose.
Meanwhile, another report from the ONS on the cost-of-living crisis has shown that the proportion of all adults finding it difficult (very or somewhat) to afford their energy bills, rent or mortgage payments has increased through the year. Almost half of adults (45%) who paid energy bills (40% in March to June 2022) and 30% paying rent or mortgages reported these being difficult to afford (26% March to June 2022).
Around four in 10 (44%) white adults reported finding it difficult to afford their energy bills, compared with around two-thirds (69%) for Black or Black British adults and around 6 in 10 (59%) Asian or Asian British adults.
