The supermarket essentials that have gone up by more than 50% in a year

I stared into the refrigerated display at my local Lidl, hoping my eyes were deceiving me.

The block of Valley Spire cheddar looked about the same as it did in February last year, and at 400g it was certainly the same weight.

But while I had paid £1.79 for the cheese at the start of 2022, I now had to pay £2.79 for the exact same product – a 56 per cent increase.

But when I compared the prices of food items I bought 14 months ago to their retail prices this week, I quickly realized that wasn’t the worst of it.

A 500 gram bag of Aldi penne pasta had risen in price by 75 percent, from 45 pence to 79 pence; a bottle of Sainsbury’s squash from £1.35 to £2.80 – a whopping 107 per cent increase.

Other goods had shrunk in size in sneaky instances of “shrinkflation” — where a product’s volume is reduced but the price remains the same, or higher.

For example, Morrisons Cheddar cost £2 per 400g. Now 350 grams sell for £2.35, which represents a 34 per cent price increase weight for weight.

Of course, every week I notice the bump on my supermarket bill. But it’s shocking to see how much basic items have gone up – and sadly, it seems unlikely that prices will drop any time soon.

Yesterday, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that inflation, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index, fell less than expected, falling to 10.1 percent in March.

Food, which the ONS calculated has risen in price by as much as 19.1 percent since last year, is a major cause of this.

After analyzing 26,000 food and drink products from the eight major supermarkets — Aldi, Asda, Lidl, Morrisons, Ocado, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose — consumer site Which? found that budget assortments at supermarkets have increased further, by 24.8 percent, hitting the poorest households that depend on these brands the hardest.

And in my own alarming research, I found that many essentials have increased by more than 50 percent.

Food prices started to rise during the pandemic, as global supply chains were disrupted, but it was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February that really pushed inflation.

The resulting rise in energy prices soon affected the entire food production line, from harvesting produce to keeping supermarket lights on to online grocery delivery.

And since then prices have just skyrocketed.

To investigate what value for money the supermarkets’ own brands offered, I bought the cheapest assortment of 12 different supermarket staples from each of the eight major supermarkets in February.

This week I returned to each item to find out how much more each one cost.

So which items rose the most? And which supermarkets have fought the price rise most successfully?

n FIRST price February 2022, second price April 2023. Where original product was no longer available, closest equivalent has been found.