INFLATION IN FLAMES: A hot meal has increased in price by almost 50 percent due to food prices in two years

We always have the impression that products in stores have increased in price significantly more than the statistical average. Consumer prices have, according to statisticians, risen by 18.2 percent over the past two years, but food has increased significantly more – 27.6 percent. Since the average consumer spends almost a third of their income on food, their basket of products often increases by more than 20 percent.

However, food has not only increased in stores. Entrepreneurs are facing the same price increases. The cost of food for one hot meal at Plamen in Požega was €1.14 in 2021, and two years later it was €1.68, an increase of 47.6 percent. The head of Plamen Vinko Matijević claims that this is precise evidence of inflation for them and that food prices are rising twice as fast as the official estimate. The total cost of a hot meal – which was fully paid for by the employer – has thus increased from €3.27 to €3.90, mainly due to more expensive food, as they have practically frozen other costs. This means that the hot meal for a worker who worked 220 days a year has increased from €719 to €858, and on an annual basis, with over 60 thousand meals, this is an additional cost of more than €37,800.

And this is not the only cost. At Plamen, they have mostly increased salaries linearly, so the lowest wages have followed this increase in food prices – explains Matijević. We ask him how he explains the 20 percent difference between the official and Plamen’s ‘kitchen’ inflation.

– I have no idea how statisticians calculated, for example, the increase in the price of oil and fats by 8.9 percent in two years; I think much of it is closer to the increase in the price of eggs by 57.6 percent. Furthermore, it should be noted that fertilizer was 2.5 times more expensive last year than two years ago. Thus, it would be clearer that the frozen price of gas is returning to citizens like a boomerang through more expensive fertilizer, i.e., food – concludes Matijević.

As if this story confirms the definition that statistics is an accurate sum of inaccurate data. Or is it the other way around?