The month of March was indeed red on the side of the labels of branded products in supermarkets. Consequence: our shopping basket increases further. Discover its price in your department on our interactive map.
An increase of 56% over one year for first-price sugar, +28% for private label rice and first-price toilet paper… Inflation continued its headlong rush in March. The 37 products in the franceinfo basket, in partnership with France Bleu and the NielsenIQ firm, increased by 17.7% between March 2022 and March 2023.
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This is one inflation point more than in February. Very concretely, this means that in one year, the total of our shopping basket has increased by almost 16 euros, going from 90.8 in March 2022 to 106.25 euros today. And this price varies from one department to another.
The gap is widening by two euros more than in February between the extremes. The Vendeans remain the French who pay the cheapest for their races, with a receipt which displays an average of 100.41 euros. In Paris, the same basket costs 127.5 euros on average.
Nutella, Coke and other national blockbusters with “a spectacular increase never seen”
The highlight of this new edition of the franceinfo / France Bleu basket with NielsenIQ is the return of a significant increase in the prices of national brands, and in particular of the flagship products among them.
Thus, one in a month, inflation on the leading brand of cola drinks, Coca-Cola not to mention it, rose from 9.6 to 12%. As for the flagship product of spreads, Nutella, it is a jump of 10.7 to 13% between February and March 2023. Same phenomenon for brand chips, such as Vico, Lay’s or Brets, where the increase prices over one year rose from 15.5% in February to 20.1% in March. “The biggest brands, the iconic brands by product category are the ones that have really grown the most in a month. This is unprecedentedunderlines Emmanuel Cannes, price and inflation expert at NielsenIQ. These brands are made to attract consumers to the store. They know the price of these products. So it’s still very battled and historically rather deflationary products. And there, we really have a spectacular increase that we have never seen.
These increases are the direct consequence of the commercial agreements concluded at the end of February between distributors and food manufacturers, which had given birth to a general increase in prices of around 10%. And the department most concerned about the subject is “self-service fresh products, such as yogurts or cheese, have increased by more than 15% in one year. This is really the section most affected by brand price increases”underlines the NielsenIQ expert.
“We still see record inflation in one month. There was really an application in store of the outcome of the trade negotiations.”
Emmanuel Cannes, price and inflation expert at NielsenIQat franceinfo
But then, why does the inflation of the franceinfo shopping basket, in partnership with France Bleu and NielsenIQ, not explode but rather continue its cruising rise (+1 point over a month)? Mainly because the trade negotiations were only about national brand products. As half of our basket is made up of distributor or entry-level products, the impact is more moderate. Especially since the evolution of inflation on entry-level products, although still very high, is beginning to decline: there was a 1.6 point increase between January and February, against only 0.5 point between February and March.
And for the next few months?
Unsurprisingly, the waltz of labels should continue in the coming weeks. The increases observed between February and March do not yet cover all of the increases decided upon during trade negotiations. Already last month, NielsenIQ announced a “red spring”.
The consumer monitoring firm remains confident about its forecast: we should have reached the inflationary peak this summer. But inflation should then remain at high levels.
Methodology
franceinfo and France Bleu have joined forces with NielsenIQ, a firm specializing in monitoring consumption, to establish this basket. Its composition meets two objectives: to be as close as possible to household consumption, with a basket of daily food and hygiene products, and to be as mixed as possible in its composition, by mixing national brand products, branded products distributors and first price products.
There is a strong representation in our basket of entry-level and private label products. A choice explained by the trends of recent weeks: the French have massively turned to these products to offset inflation and if they are still much cheaper than the others, it is also on them that the rise in prices is the most important.
Each of these products was then linked to one of the more than 500 product categories monitored by NielsenIQ, which provided us with the average inflation for the category over the month of February and the average price of the product in France over a period of four weeks, from February 20, 2023 to March 19, 2023.
The inflation of the basket was then obtained by calculating the average of the inflations. To obtain the price of the basket by department, we applied the price index of each department to the national amount.
You won’t find fresh fruits and vegetables there, because the database we had access to did not allow tracking of loose fruits and vegetables.