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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
Business
Ruby Flanagan

Shoppers in Britain forced to pay £833 MORE for their food than this time last year

Grocery inflation dropped slightly in May but the price of an average yearly food shop is still £833 higher than last year.

Analysts at Kantar today revealed grocery price inflation dropped slightly to 17.2% for the four weeks to May 14 - this is only a slight drop from the 17.3% the UK saw last month.

It is also only marginally down from the record high of 17.5% in March.

Kantar says this is the third fastest rate of grocery inflation it had seen since 2008.

Although this may sound like goo news, the low inflation figure does not mean prices are going down - prices are still rising just at a slightly slower pace than before.

Even with the cost of living pressures, today's figures show that Brits wanted to celebrate the Coronation of King Charles III and spent £218milion at supermarkets over that week.

Kantar reports that the average cost for four pints of milk had come down by 8p last month - but was still higher than this time last year at £1.60.

This aligns with the fact that major UK supermarkets all began cutting the price of their own-brand milk products last month with Tesco being the first in the domino lineup.

Fraser McKevitt, head of retail and consumer insight at Kantar, said: "The drop in grocery price inflation, which is down by 0.1 percentage points on last month's figure, is without doubt welcome news for shoppers but it is still incredibly high.

Kantar found that shoppers continued to try and make savings by ditching the brands and switching to supermarket-own-brand products as sales went up by 15.2% this month.

This is almost double the 8.3% rise seen for branded products.

Just as predicted last month, the coronation weekend did have an impact on this month's figures as sales of sparkling and still wine climbed by 129% and 33% respectively.

Kantar said this was driven by demand rather than price rises as wine inflation sits at 1%.

Fraser added "Lots of people seem to have got into the spirit of the royal occasion, grabbing their chance to have a go at the official Coronation Quiche recipe.

"Sales of ingredients like chilled pastry surged by 89%, while fresh cream sales jumped by 80% and frozen broad beans by 57%.

"We'll have to wait and see whether it becomes as much loved as its 1953 counterpart Coronation Chicken and cements its place on the British picnic and garden party menu."

Waitrose in particular benefited from the coronation with sales up by 4.8%, the highest rate of growth the retailer has achieved since April 2021.

Aldi's 24% sales increase made it the fastest growing grocer this month, while Lidl's sales increased by 23.2%.

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