Despite the price shock – the food account below the EU average

A Swedish household spends 15.3 percent of its expenses on food and non-alcoholic beverages.

The average in the EU is 17.3 percent, according to the Union’s statistical authority Eurostat’s latest harmonized index of consumer prices, HICP, for 2023, based on 2022 consumption.

Among the member countries, it is only Ireland, Luxembourg, Austria, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands and Finland where households spend a smaller part of their total consumption on food and drink than in Sweden.

Indicator of prosperity

“What proportion of income and consumption households spend on food is usually an indicator of prosperity,” says John Eliasson, price statistician at Statistics Norway, Statistics Norway.

— In poor countries, people usually spend a larger part of their total consumption on food.

Mattias Persson, Swedbank’s chief economist, admits that he is surprised by the figures, but emphasizes that Swedish households will be forced to spend a greater part of their consumption on food.

— In real terms, households have already been forced to change their consumption radically. They have cut back on clothes, shoes, fixtures and household goods in order in many cases to be able to continue consuming what is necessary, such as food, electricity and housing interest, he says.

— If we look ahead, we believe that food prices will continue to rise for a while longer, and that more and more of the consumption will have to go to essential goods such as food.

According to Statistics Sweden’s CPI basket, which measures the extent to which Swedish households consume various goods and services, food and non-alcoholic beverages account for 13.3 percent of total consumption.

Their statistical tool differs from Eurostat’s, where ownership of housing is not included and thus not interest costs linked to housing.

Statistics Sweden has figures on the development of the consumer basket that go back seven decades. The statistics shows a gradual decrease in the share in total consumption.

Swedish food prices higher than average

In 1950, food and drink made up 30 percent of the basket; In 1990, before Sweden’s entry into the EU, the consumer basket consisted of just over 15 percent of food – a level that has been more or less intact since then, with a couple of percentage declines in the following two decades.

But food prices in Sweden are still at a significantly higher level than the average in Europe. According to Eurostat’s latest study for the year 2021, Swedish food prices were 18 percent higher than the EU average. Factors that influence include high taxes and fees on food, high production and distribution costs and high living standards.

An average household spends such a large share of the total consumption in each EU country.