Fresh food rose and processed food did not

27 October 2026 · Deze pagina is beschikbaar in het Engels.

Kristel Mägi

Eurostat published the full September figures on 16 October: euro area inflation at 3.8 per cent, and food, alcohol and tobacco at 1.3. The flash estimate had split that group, unprocessed food at 4.0 per cent and the processed half at 0.4, and neither number appears on an invoice or in a price list.

Price Double Check works at the other end of that gap: a buyer forwards the documents and the reply comes back by email naming the lines where the billed price and the listed price disagree. One number cannot describe a shelf that moved in two directions. An index explains a market, and it does not explain a line.

What the release of 16 October says

The full tables for September put euro area annual inflation at 3.8 per cent, against 3.2 per cent a month earlier. Food, alcohol and tobacco contributed a quarter of a percentage point to that total, on a group rate of 1.3 per cent where August had read 1.1. The flash estimate of 2 October, which named the components a fortnight before the full tables arrived, carried the same headline and put energy at 18.8 per cent, which is where most of the 3.8 is coming from.

The first two rows are from the full release of 16 October. The last two are from the flash estimate of 2 October, which is where Eurostat breaks the food group apart. The fortnight between the two moved the group as a whole by a tenth of a point, from 1.4 to 1.3 per cent, which is a useful reminder of how much weight a single decimal in a letter deserves.

One group, two opposite movements

Unprocessed food is the produce end: fruit, vegetables, meat and fish, the part of the basket a harvest and a cold month reach directly. Processed food, alcohol and tobacco is nearly everything else a distributor carries, from the jar to the carton to the bottle. In September the first ran at four per cent and the second at rather less than one, and the average of the two is the figure that ends up quoted.

That makes the phrase food inflation close to unusable this autumn. A supplier of fresh produce who quotes the group average understates its own position. A supplier of packed goods who quotes it overstates. Neither figure says anything about one item code under one agreement, and both are less work to write than a price list is to revise. The same gap, read from the other side, is what the August figures could not tell a buyer about one line.

What the split changes for a buyer

An increase letter is an argument built on a number the buyer cannot check, and it is answered with numbers the buyer can. Those are not published by a statistical office. They are in the documents already sitting in the inbox, and the order of reading them is laid out in the increase letter against the next price list.

1. Establish which half of the index the supplier is actually in. A letter that leans on the euro area average while selling packed goods is leaning on a group that moved by 0.4 per cent in September.
2. Put last quarter's invoiced prices beside the current list, code by code. An increase that reached invoices before any list carried it is not a rise being proposed; it is one being ratified after the fact.
3. Compare the new list with the previous list and not only with the invoices. In the supply chain behind this service, sixteen changes were visible only list to list, and four of them were a smaller pack at the same price — a rise no invoice prints, because invoices do not carry packaging.
4. Rank what you find by percentage while you are still reading lists, and in euros once the invoices show how much of each line you actually buy.

The index is doing its own job properly: it measures what households pay, across a continent, on a weighting it publishes in full. It is measuring a different thing from the one a buyer is holding, and this month it is also measuring two things at once and reporting their average as though it were a fact about food.

Forward one invoice and the price list that was in force when the goods moved, and the lines where the two disagree come back by email. What a check costs and what the reply contains are set out on the home page.