Food goods, underlines Istat, represent over a fifth of the economic value of goods and services consumed by Italian families in 2025. Food alone4 represents, on average, 16.6% of spending.
Since these are mainly necessary goods, they are characterized by the rigidity of their demand with respect to price increases. Furthermore, increases in price lists have a significant impact on the purchasing power of families, especially those with lower incomes given the greater share of food compared to total consumption.
The causes of the “exceptional” growth in food prices in Italy, according to the institute, can be identified in a combination of factors, especially of an external nature, which have led to strong increases above all in the international prices of production inputs in the food sector.
Internal factors, however, have acted to a more limited extent, particularly in more recent years. Starting from the second half of 2021, upward pressure began to appear in the international prices of food raw materials due to the post-pandemic economic recovery phase.
In this context, in the presence of growing demand6 and frictions in supply due to the readjustments of global chains after the pandemic, there has been a contraction in global supply also caused by adverse weather events in the main exporting countries.
Starting from February 2022, the invasion of Ukraine and the resulting international sanctions (i.e. blocking natural gas imports) against Russia have led to strong inflationary pressures on energy goods.
In the same period, the prices of food raw materials continued to rise. In Italy, the consumer price of energy goods increased from October 2021 to November 2022 by 76%, much more than the average of the euro area (38.7%), the EU27 (36.8%) and the other main European countries: Germany (42.7), France (21.1%) and Spain (2.9%).
The increase in the cost of energy has had “a direct and particularly significant impact” on the unprocessed food sector, where the weight of energy inputs on total inputs (5.5%) is more than double the average of other sectors excluding energy (2.2%) and more than one percentage point higher than the entire economy (4.4%).