Bulgaria: Sellers Upped Food Prices to Record Highs during Pandemic

While during the Covid-marked 2020 we stayed more at home and walked mainly to the refrigerator and back, it turned out that we had been eating record-expensive foods. The analysis of wholesale prices of staple groceries: sugar, flour, oil, rice and pulses scored an year-on-year increase, with the annual averages for most of them being the highest for the period 2015 - 2020.

This is the conclusion in the annual analysis for 2020 of the State Commission on Commodity Exchanges and Markets (SCCEM).

The goods in which a decrease is registered are scarcely any.

Last year rocketing prices were recorded in sausages (19.8% compared to 2019), minced meat (17.9%), rice (15.3%), oil (14.4%), cheese (13.8%), beans (12.8%), pork (10.9%), sugar (10.8%) etc. In fruits and vegetables the list is topped by apricots (56%), apples (39% compared to 2019), oranges and lemons (by 32% and 20%, respectively).

However, the price dynamics in the fruits and vegs is much more diverse and related to their seasonality. Therefore, there are a number of goods whose average price is lower than the previous year, such as onions, potatoes, pepper and cherries.

Wholesale prices are actually a function of many factors - good or bad harvest, transport costs, wages, processing complexity, gasoline prices, electricity and others, but retail prices are directly dependent on the retailers' mark-up.

According to the analysts' observations, the retail mark-up for foods varied on average between 4 and 39%.

The leaps vs wholesale prices in the large retail chains are greatest in eggs - 39%, followed by flour - 24%, cooking oil - 17%, and sugar - 4%. In the shop network, the largest mark-up of 33% is for eggs, in flour it is 31%, in oil - 21%, and sugar - 17%....