The conflict in Ukraine, in addition to the COVID-19 pandemic which has triggered disruption in the global food supply chain (Bai et al., 2022), leads to significant price spikes for various foods aggregates (Jagtap et al., 2022), in particular for wheat and vegetable oils. As a consequence, in the Euro area, headline inflation has risen notably since mid-2021 and peaked at a historic high of 5.9% in February 2022 (Nickel et al., 2022). According to the Italian National Institute of Statistics, inflation is expected to reach 10% in January 2023 and the prices of grocery and unprocessed food increased by 12.0% on annual basis (ISTAT, 2023). In this situation, the most vulnerable group of people appear to be the hardest hit by inflation. Indeed for some food aggregates (eg. Vegetable Oils, Pasta and Tea) it has been observed that the least cost item, which is the item least cost in a food group, increased significantly since September 2021 (ONS, 2022), thus reducing the purchasing power of food for vulnerable consumers and directly increase household spending on food and food poverty identified in terms of economic access to food (Faharuddin et al., 2022). In this perspective, the aim of this paper is twofold: on one hand we assess food inflation over specific foods aggregates at detailed sub-national level in Italy by constructing a basket of foods items, that are representative of a typical household's consumption patterns, obtained from Osservatorio Prezzi tool of the Ministry of Economic Development referring to 64 Italian Provinces over the period August 2021- November 2022. To perform detailed analysis on food prices across time and space at foods aggregate level, we used the stochastic approach of the index number. On the other hand, with the aim of analyzing the economic access of food for vulnerable people, we track the item least cost in a food group increase using web-scraped which refer to more than 460 supermarkets located in 19 Italian regions collected from February 2021. These data include price, retail chain and outlet, city and detailed information on each product (eg. brand, package size) thus allowing us to provide information on differences in consumer prices across space and over time in a timely manner.
