ECB daily supermarket prices: food repricing after the new energy shock is weaker than 2022

Serguey Asael Shinder03 November 2026, 08:281 min read

Four ECB economists, Chiara Osbat, Christian Höynck, Umberto Maglione and Elisabeth Wieland, wrote on the ECB blog on 2 November that the current wave of food price increases in euro area supermarkets is weaker than the one in 2022. Their evidence comes from the Daily Price Dataset, a tool the ECB built to follow supermarket prices day by day as shocks unfold, which the authors say now uses AI tools to track how retailers change prices.

The question they set out is whether the energy shock from the war in the Middle East has started a new round of food price rises. The data show that repricing initially increased fairly broadly and then stabilised. In 2022, after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the repricing wave kept rising. The blog explains why the pattern matters for policy: after a large cost shock firms may raise prices earlier than planned, so the frequency of increases jumps, and that is what makes the inflation response non-linear and potentially persistent.

The authors note that food makes up around 20% of the expenditure basket behind the euro area's harmonised consumer price index, a larger share for low-income households, and that food prices weigh heavily in how households perceive inflation and form expectations.

What it means

For the ECB this is a reading on how often prices are being changed, not only by how much, and on that measure the current shock looks smaller than 2022's so far. It is a real-time indicator rather than official inflation data, so the test is whether the next HICP food figures follow the same flattening.