Food passes through a supply chain: from farms, to the food processing industry, then to retailers. The food supply chain may be short and simple or more complex depending on the product and the country.
The final price the customer pays for food is always influenced by pricing developments earlier in the chain. To shed light on these price developments, Eurostat has set up a food price monitoring tool.
The tool provides detailed information on the development of agricultural prices, import prices as well as producer and consumer prices, broken down by product categories.
The food price monitoring tool also includes experimental indicators that measure price transmission. These test indicators indicate the extent to which price changes earlier in the chain affect price changes later down the chain. It is worth noting that as the indicators are estimated using econometric models, they rely on a number of assumptions. For that reason, the results given are of an experimental nature and should be interpreted with caution.
You can access the food price monitoring tool in any of the 23 official languages of the European Union here or find more background information here.
