UK targets 1 billion grocery products a month in inflation overhaul

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain will gather price data from over 1 billion units of grocery sales each month from supermarket scanners when it introduces a new system for measuring inflation in the sector next year, the country's statistics agency said on Tuesday.

The Office for National Statistics, which is modernising the way it gets information on the economy, said the move in March 2025 represented the biggest update so far of its inflation data gathering, covering 50% of the grocery market.

Currently, ONS price collectors go into shops to gather 25,000 prices per month but the new system will cover approximately 300 million price points derived from sales of over a billion units of products per month, the agency said.

The new system will improve the breadth of products covered by the ONS, gather prices across the entire month rather than on a specific day and tell the ONS about quantities sold, capturing changes in consumer behaviour in response to price changes.

Last year, the agency began using a new source of digital data covering all consumer train fares and this year it increased the number of price points for second-hand cars from 105 to 300,000 per month.

The ONS will continue to use price collectors to measure how prices have changed in smaller grocery shops and other outlets.

(Writing by William Schomberg, editing by Andy Bruce)