Milk prices won’t be falling any further: Arla

Sales of Arla’s branded products, such as Lurpak and Anchor butter, slumped by 10 per cent last year as shoppers switched to lower-priced own-brands to save cash. Since last year, a 500g tub of Lurpak butter has increased by around 37 per cent from an initial £3.65. Amirahmadi said Arla had shrunk its Lurpak tubs from 500g to 400g and cut the price by a fifth after customers said it was too costly.

Major supermarkets have dropped their prices first by 10p in April.

Meanwhile, latest data from the Which? Supermarket Inflation Tracker confirms that price rises are starting to slow, although the figure remains high despite claims by the leading supermarkets that they are starting to cut some prices to reflect falling costs.

Based on a comparison of around 25,000 products at eight supermarkets – Aldi, Asda, Lidl, Morrisons, Ocado, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose – the tracker showed that annual inflation for food and drink dipped slightly again to 16.4 per cent in the three months to 30 June 2023 (down from its peak of 17 per cent in the three months to the end of April and also down from last month’s figure of 16.9 per cent).

Food prices in June 2023 were 25.8 per cent higher than they were in June 2021, and some individual items had risen far more sharply.

“Two years of relentlessly soaring food prices have had a devastating impact on households,” reports quoted Sue Davies, the Which? head of food policy, as saying. “This isn’t helped by the confusing and inconsistent pricing practices used by some supermarkets, which make it incredibly difficult to work out how to find the best value products.”