Falling meat and chocolate prices help drive down UK inflation

31 Oct 2018 --- Cheaper chocolate prices contributed to driving down UK inflation in September, according to Office of National Statistics (ONS) data. The UK inflation rate decline was more than expected after hitting a six-month high in August. Inflation fell during September with the consumer price index (CPI) declining 2.4 percent from 2.7 percent in August. 

The largest downward contribution to inflation was because of food and non-alcoholic beverages which fell 0.1 percent between August and September. A year ago prices increased between the same two months. 

And the downward contribution was mostly because of meat and chocolate prices. However, other large downward contributions came from transport, recreation & culture and clothing. Partially offsetting upward contributions came from increases to electricity and gas prices, according to the ONS. 

This comes as the average earnings for UK workers have increased at the fastest rate in almost ten years. Combining this with lower prices for food and non-alcoholic products suggests that price pressures on British residents that have been seen since the EU referendum Brexit vote more than two years ago may be beginning to subside. 

Consumer price inflation is the rate at which the prices of goods and services bought by households rise or fall. It is estimated by using price indices. One way to understand this is to think of a shopping basket containing all the goods and services bought by households. Movements in price indices represent the changing cost of this basket.

Fluctuations in raw material costs
Supply fluctuations of raw materials like cocoa impact the price of chocolate which has been subject to price volatility for many years. This is partly because the world’s largest cocoa growing regions – in terms of total mass, West Africa produces more cocoa than any other world region – are made up of networks of smallholder cocoa farmers. There can be difficulties in aligning production with demand which then could have an impact on price. 

Origin of chocolate study
At the same time as chocolate is impacting on UK inflation, new research suggests that cacao – the plant from which chocolate is made – was domesticated, or grown by people for food, around 1,500 years earlier than previously thought. In addition, the researchers found cacao was initially domesticated in South America, rather than in Central America.

Archaeological evidence of cacao's use, dating back 3,900 years ago, previously planted the idea that the cacao tree was first domesticated in Central America. But genetic evidence showing that the highest diversity of the cacao tree and related species is actually found in equatorial South America-where cacao is essential to contemporary Indigenous groups-led the University of British Columbia (UBC) team and their colleagues to search for evidence of the plant at an archaeological site in the region.

“This new study shows us that people in the upper reaches of the Amazon basin were harvesting and consuming cacao that appears to be a close relative of the type of cacao later used in Mexico – and they were doing this 1,500 years earlier,” says Michael Blake, study co-author and professor in the UBC department of anthropology. 

“They were also doing so using elaborate pottery that pre-dates the pottery found in Central America and Mexico. This suggests that the use of cacao, probably as a drink, was something that caught on and very likely spread northwards by farmers growing cacao in what is now Colombia and eventually Panama and other parts of Central America and southern Mexico.”