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It would have been hard not to notice your grocery bill not going up in recent years. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) measured that food commodity prices increased 72% between January 2019 and March 2022. Consumer prices for food increased with a lower amount and with a lag as the whole value chain was adjusting to commodity cost increases, but still went up substantially relatively to recent history. We are now at the interesting point where both food commodity prices and consumer prices for food have risen by about 30% compared to the beginning of 2019. This begs the question whether food retailers and food producers will be able to hold on to current prices if food commodity prices drop or stay where they are at. In a different scenario, will they be able to increase prices again if food commodity prices go higher? So far, food consumer prices have kept creeping up despite food commodity prices trending slightly down.

Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, September 2024.