COVID-19 Leads to a Drop in Average Food Prices
By: Ekta Khanchandani
Tags: Covid 19, Food Prices, Food, Food Data, Coronavirus

COVID-19 Leads to a Drop in Average Food Prices

In addition to tracking the virus, data visualization can help us measure the impact COVID-19 has had on everyday life

The coronavirus pandemic continues to affect the global population on a daily basis. The response to the virus requires restricting movement, interaction, and gatherings everywhere around the world. In the United Kingdom, the spread of COVID-19 began on January 31. As time has passed, the number of cases and deaths in the country have increased swiftly, with a total of 31,587 deaths as of May 10.

The virus has taken a toll on over half the British adult populations’ mental well-being and continues to affect people everyday. Financial troubles, high levels of anxiety and worrying about friends and family are some of the social difficulties faced by people, the ONS has recently reported. The virus is continually changing people’s lives in more ways than we can count.

After analysing and reporting on park mobility around the world a couple weeks ago, I continued to search for more data showcasing the different ways in which the virus has impacted human population. With a keen interest in food as well as running a food blog on a daily basis, I was curious about how food prices were reacting to the current circumstances and began looking for data to support it.

My findings highlighted one factor impacting the entire UK population: food prices. The Guardian referred to the British population as “the nation of stockpilers” in February of this year, as panic buying and shortages on products (remember #toiletrollcrisis?) took over grocery stores in the UK. Following the changes in shopping activity, I wanted to look at how the prices of food reacted to these changes. Over the last few months, the Office for National Statistics has continued to release their monthly CPI figures on average food prices in the UK. The CPI average food price datasets include prices of items sold in grocery stores and chains around the country.

I compiled the food price datasets between October 2019 and March 2020 to highlight the changes since the spread of COVID-19 in the UK. The data is available on products sold in grocery stores ranging from bread, milk, and meat, to vegan sausages and frozen pizzas, each one showing the average price of the product in the UK. I analysed the six datasets and realised that the sample size varied from month to month, with minor differences of one or two products. This meant that visualising the impact on individual products would be impossible due to missing data. However, I chose to calculate and record the mean food price for each respective month given the basket of goods to conclude changes between food price averages in a fair manner. Furthermore, I went on to visualise my dataset in R using the libraries Tidyverse and Ggplot2. I created and imported a new dataset containing mean food prices for each month, illustrating a fall in average food prices between January 2020 and February 2020, just as the impact of COVID-19 began affecting the country [shown below].

The graph below is also available in an interactive version using the R package Plotly.