The Office for National Statistics has recently announced a major revamp of its inflation measurement system for grocery prices.
Starting March next year the agency will gather price data from over 1 billion grocery items on a monthly basis, using supermarket scanner data. This means a significant expansion on the current methods which relies on manually gathering 25,000 prices on a monthly basis.
The new system will cover roughly 50% of the grocery market in the UK and will provide the ONS with a far more comprehensive and accurate perspective of price changes across a wider range of products.
Also by tracking prices across the entire month rather than on a single day, the ONS will also be able to better understand how consumers respond to price changes.