the price of our 37 products is finally falling, but the outlook is darkening for the end of the year

It took eleven months for the sky to clear up. The total of our franceinfo shopping basket, in partnership with France Bleu and the NielsenIQ firm, is decreasing. It has lost 26 cents since August and now costs on average 109.61 euros.

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However, we should not see in this the long-awaited drop in prices, but rather a “continued stabilization”, as analyzed by NielsenIQ. A sign of this stagnation: the inflation of our shopping basket continues to slow down. It lost more than one point compared to last month and now stands at 12.34% over one year.

This slowdown is true in all departments, but it does not erase the territorial differences that we have been seeing for several months now. Paris remains the most expensive department in France, Vendée is still the least expensive. 28 euros separate the basket totals in these two departments.

A barely perceptible drop

These 26 cents are paltry compared to the 20 euro increase experienced by our 37 everyday products over the past 18 months. “It’s difficult to perceive for the consumer”, notes Emmanuel Cannes, price and inflation expert at NielsenIQ, who emphasizes that the drop is lower than that expected. If our basket total decreases, it is because many products see their prices decrease between August and September. Among the most significant reductions, the packet of national brand spaghetti lost 9 cents and now costs €2.60.

Taking a step back also allows us to put this drop in prices into perspective. Of the 37 products in our shopping basket, only 9 have a lower price today than in January. We are therefore still very far from a massive movement of price reductions.

The horizon darkens

The horizon of a global reduction in prices is moving away. NielsenIQ is less optimistic at the end of September than at the start of the school year.

“We don’t have many signs, at least for the end of the year, which tell us that we are going to have further significant declines.”

Emmanuel Cannes, price and inflation expert at NielsenIQ

at franceinfo

So what has happened since the start of the school year? First, there is the famous system of 5,000 products at a blocked price, which is slow to be put in place by distributors. Then, energy prices have recently started to rise again, and this is bound to have an impact on production costs. It may even have already started: the three frozen products in our shopping basket saw their labels increase very slightly between August and September, going against the overall trend.

And then, above all, there are the annual negotiations that are approaching, between supermarkets and their suppliers. Bercy even fought and submitted a law to Parliament so that they could start early. “The objective was to pass on the drop in certain raw materials”, notes Emmanuel Cannes. But in fact, as Michel-Edouard Leclerc indicated on franceinfo and as NielsenIQ experts have observed, many manufacturers will ask for price increases. “We will perhaps achieve an effect opposite to that expected, if the increases outweigh the decreases”continues Emmanuel Cannes.

We will only know in January, when the negotiations conclude. By then, he We should therefore rather expect continuity: no increase on the receipt… but no decrease either.

Methodology

franceinfo and France Bleu have joined forces with the NielsenIQ firm, a firm specializing in consumption monitoring, to establish this basket. Its composition meets two objectives: to be as close as possible to household consumption, with a basket of everyday food and hygiene products, and to be as mixed as possible in its composition, by mixing national brand products, branded products distributors and low price products.

There is a strong representation in our basket of low-cost and private label products. A choice explained by the trends of recent months: the French have massively turned to these products to compensate for inflation and if they still remain much cheaper than the others, it is also on them that the price increase has been the most important.

Each of these products was then attached to one of the more than 500 product categories that NielsenIQ monitors, which provided us with the average inflation of the category for the month of July and the average price of the product in France over a period of four weeks, from August 21 to September 17, 2023.

Basket inflation 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 bulk fruits and vegetables.