Review: Retail consumer price data reveal gaps and opportunities to monitor food systems for nutrition

The Cost and Affordability of Preparing a Basic Meal Around the World

“…To guide these interventions, governments will need to continue investing in improved data collection regarding food prices, the externalities involved in true cost accounting, and the hidden costs of food acquisition and meal preparation within the home. Governments routinely collect nationally-representative market prices for a variety of foods each month to calculate their consumer price indexes, and international agencies such as the WFP, FAO and FEWS NET also collect rural market prices to target food assistance (Bai et al 2021a). The World Bank is expanding its global office so that the ICP can focus on food prices and diet costs, in collaboration with national statistical organizations around the world (Food Prices for Nutrition 2021).…”

COVID-19 mobility restrictions and stay-at-home behaviour in 2020 were associated with higher retail food prices worldwide

“…The data presented here demonstrate the importance of closely monitoring price levels, not just for commonly traded and stored commodities, but also for foods in retail markets. In recognition of this gap, new work has been conducted to describe and compile publicly available food price index data from national governments and international agencies ( Bai et al, 2021b ). However, this work notes the need for increased transparency, accessibility, standardization, and timeliness in price index data reporting.…”

“…We then calculate month-to-month percentage point change in price level for each food item in each market. Food items were grouped into one of eight categories (breads and cereals; nuts, seeds, and pulses; fruits and vegetables; meat; fish and seafood; dairy and eggs; oils and fats; sugar and confectionary) based on an adapted version of the COICOP classification system, detailed in Bai et al (2021b , 2022) . The proportion of price observations categorized into each food group in each country is provided in Fig.…”

Data on location and retail price of a standard food basket in supermarkets across New York City

“…Previous work has suggested that there may be some differences in the price of food according to characteristics of a neighborhood [7] , [8] , [9] . To capture as much of the variability across New York City neighborhoods as possible, we aimed to sample at least one supermarket from each of the 55 community districts in New York City.…”