Alcohol-free beer bumps premium lager in inflation basket

By Oliver Catchpole

Published: 16 March, 2026

In the latest update to the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) – the basket of goods the government uses to measure inflation – off-trade sales of alcohol-free beer have been added to the list for the first time.

The ONS said that this change in the CPI was due to sales increases in recent years, along with an expansion of product ranges and shelf space for such SKUs.

Some of the other changes to the basket seem to reflect a consumer shift towards purchases perceived as healthier, with items such as houmous also being added, as reported by the BBC.

Read more: Salon discussion – Sustainability and the Italian Winescape

Speaking to the broadcaster, Stephen Burgess, deputy director for prices at the ONS, said: “This year, healthier lifestyle choices influence consumer spending, reflected by goods such as houmous and non-alcoholic beer.”

Meanwhile, on-trade sales of premium bottled lager dropped off the list, with the ONS claiming that “other alcohol items were sufficiently representative of price movements”.

New and Old World white wines were also merged into one item covering all off-trade sales of white wine, as their price movements happen in a similar way.

Overall, 4% of the 760 items in the basket fell into the Alcohol and tobacco category.

Several factors go into what the ONS chooses as a representative item, including ease of finding and pricing the product, availability throughout the year, amount spent on the item and variability of prices.

In total, 27 goods were added to the CPI (including baby food, motorhomes and pet grooming) and 19 have been removed (including overnight hotel accommodation, priced the day before travel).

However, some of these removals and additions result from categories being updated, rather than completely removed (for example, spray oil has been replaced with non-olive spray oil).

Many of these changes to the CPI have come from the ONS’s plans to use supermarket scanners to collect data for over half the grocery market – a new method of data collection.

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