Tanya Dando

put simply, inflation is the rate at which prices rise over time.

And some things go up in price, some things go down in price.

And the way we usually measure it is we have a basket of goods, things like airfares, food, professional services, getting a haircut, you name it, and they all go into a basket of goods.

And you look at the price now compared to the price a year ago, and

Some will go up, some will go down.

You take an average and that gives you the general rate of inflation.

Now, some things go up faster than others.

And germane to this conversation is that food is going up faster than most other things.

Bad news is that is predicted by most to go very sharply higher by the end of the year.

People who work in food production or food preparation tend to be at the lower end of the income scale.

And you see some quite hefty wage increases.

National living wage, for example, went up 7% last year.

It's gone up another 4% this year.

For younger workers, it's gone up even more substantially than that.

And you've got employers' national insurance, which have seen a big rise in those costs, which basically pushes up the wage bill

And some areas of food production are quite labor intensive.

So you add all that together and you can perhaps see why food inflation is accelerating at a higher rate than elsewhere.

So it's quite a sort of terrible cocktail of price rises all filtering in to the price of food.

When you look at things like the impact of the Ukraine war, which also had a big impact on energy prices, it takes about three to six months before we start to see prices coming through the chain.

Then you reach a peak of about after about nine months in fresh food inflation.