Monitoring food price changes in the euro area in real time - Lessons from the 2022 24 period

Bulletin No. 259, article 1. Households closely monitor food prices as they are part of their daily purchases. Driven by a sharp rise in commodity prices in 2021, food prices increased strongly between early 2022 and early 2023, before stabilising in 2023 and 2024. In order to analyse this development as closely as possible, the European Central Bank has developed a web-scraping tool that collects every day several thousand prices set by a number of supermarkets in the euro area and published on the Internet. …