Prime M meets food industry as prices soar

Food prices continued to soar over the last year, according to new research as the prime minister meets industry leaders over high costs.

Supermarkets and farmers will discuss with Rishi Sunak how the UK can improve the way it produces and sells food.

Consumer group Which? said the price of some goods jumped by as much as 25% in April compared to the same month last year.

Dairy goods such as cheese saw the biggest rise, said Which?

Overall, in a survey of the UK’s eight largest supermarkets looking at 26,000 products, it said food prices rose more than 17%.

Mr Sunak is meeting around 70 food industry leaders at Downing St on Tuesday.

Supermarkets are starting to bring down the prices of bread and butter but Which? says prices remained at “shockingly high levels” compared with last year.

It also found supermarket own-label budget items were up 25% in April compared with the same period 12 months ago.

Tesco announced that it is cutting prices of vegetable and sunflower oil as well as pasta by 15p. But a 500g bag of penne pasta is still 80p – in 2021, it was 50p.

However, Bill Grimsey, the former boss of frozen food chain Iceland warned: “If anybody thinks prices are gong to come down quickly anytime soon, well they’re not.”

Farmers and businesses have been hit by rising operating costs, in part caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Other expenses such as shipping costs – which soared during the Covid pandemic – have since fallen but Mr Grimsey said shoppers are unlikely to see the impact of this on the prices they pay.

Ahead of the summit, the government said it would offer 45,000 visas to farmers next year to recruit fruit and vegetable pickers from overseas.

The move comes after the Home Secretary Suella Braverman said there was “no good reason” the UK could not train its own fruit pickers to bring immigration down.

The government also pledged to put greater emphasis on farmers’ interests in future trade deals and said it would review horticulture and egg supply chains to “ensure farmers get a fair price for their produce”.

Many farmers have argued that supermarkets are not giving them a fair deal for certain goods, such as eggs.

Rising food prices are one of the main drivers behind the rise in the cost of living, but the British Retail Consortium (BRC), which represents retailers, has said they are “doing all they can to keep food prices as low as possible”.

The BRC has also called on the government to streamline regulation around recycling, packaging and Brexit to try to bring down prices for consumers.

Julian Marks, chief executive of Barfoots, where vegetables are grown on 8,500 acres (3,439 hectares) across the south coast of England, said costs have risen by as much as 30% in the last year.

“Home-grown food is a very useful, strategically important thing to have in the world we now live in,” he said.

But with profitability halved and national minimum wage costs up 40% in five years, “it’s pretty depressing”, he added. “We’re definitely not able to pass all our costs on,” he added.

The business needed about 700 seasonal workers, but Mr Marks said the company had to rely on workers from further afield.

We’ve been hearing for months about the pressures our farmers and growers have been facing, from sky high costs and labour shortages to extreme weather.

Some have had to produce their food at a loss, others have been planting less leading to warnings that farmers are facing an existential crisis.

They want a fairer price for their produce. Meanwhile supermarkets are under increasing pressure to bring food prices down. Something has to give.

Former Sainsbury’s boss, Justin King, says we’ve been through a golden era of cheap food. But getting the balance right is a hard circle for the government to square in a cost of living crisis.

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