Food inflation was particularly high in 2022 and 2023, caused by the global economic recovery following the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Faced with price shocks on inputs, the food production chain quickly passed these on to consumer prices, and this had a lasting impact on household spending habits. In particular, the national accounts published by INSEE show a 6.3% drop in the volume of food consumed (excluding tobacco) between 2021 and 2024: -9.4% for fresh food products and -5.5% for agri-food products (excluding tobacco). It rebounded only very slightly in 2025 (+0.3%).

INSEE’s household economic outlook survey provides an insight into the strategies adopted by six out of ten French people who say they are cutting back on their food spending. In January 2026, these strategies are evenly split between reducing consumption, cutting out the most expensive products (with or without replacing them) and switching to lower-end products, i.e. purchasing similar products of a lower quality. All these behaviours (reductions in physical quantities and a shift towards lower-end products) result in a decline in consumption volumes as recorded in the national accounts.

To provide a more accurate estimation of the impact of this downshift in consumption patterns on the changes in food consumption by volume within the meaning of national accounting since 2022, it is possible to compare this trend with the trend in physical volumes, i.e. excluding the product range effect, over the same period. The contribution of product range effects to the change in the volume of food consumption can therefore be estimated at -2.0 percentage points between 2021 and 2024, which is one third of the total decline recorded over the period. Pasta, tinned vegetables, biscuits and dairy products are among the items for which the shift towards lower-end alternatives has had the greatest impact on overall consumption. Thanks to high-frequency scanner data from mass retailers, which INSEE uses to calculate price and turnover indices, it is possible to pinpoint more precisely when product range effects began to emerge for the products identified. In this case, they started to appear in late 2022, a few months after the onset of the inflationary wave. The proportion of consumption on products that were initially the cheapest thus rose significantly in the space of a few months, and households appear to have continued these consumption habits ever since, despite prices stabilising and purchasing power increasing in 2024 and 2025.

Scanner data also highlights differing price trends across product ranges between 2022 and 2025. For example, when looking at food consumption as a whole, inflation over the last four years appears to have been more pronounced for entry-level products and more moderate for products positioned in higher-end segments. More specifically, if we divide the quantities sold of each food variety at the start of 2022 into five sub-baskets of equal size, but ranked according to their average prices, we find that between January 2022 and December 2025, the prices of products in the first basket, comprising entry-level products, rose by 10 percentage points more than the overall index, and by 18 percentage points more than the fifth basket, comprising premium products. This means that households whose consumption is more heavily weighted towards entry-level products have been exposed to higher food inflation than the “average” inflation reported in the price index...