The price of pasta in the UK has nearly doubled in two years, new research for the BBC suggests. A standard 500g bag of pasta was 50p two years ago - now it's 95p.
The BBC has been tracking the cost of a small basket of 15 everyday essentials, from oven chips and strawberry jam to pasta sauce and potatoes. The total has gone up by £5.34 - from £15.79 in 2021 to £21.13 in 2023. Official figures suggest overall UK inflation may have peaked at 11.1% in October. But the rate of food price rises is still running at 16.7%.
The BBC looks at the cost of living crisis, via food price inflation, highlighting how much food prices have risen in the recent past, and attributing this to the nature of the supply chain, and the number of stages in it. The article argues that this means that it sometimes takes an awful lot of time for cost increases to manifest themselves in higher prices for consumers.