How the COVID-19 crisis is affecting food security

This project will provide evidence on how access to food, and the groceries people buy, are being affected by the COVID-19 crisis.

The pandemic has led to unprecedented changes in the supply of groceries, where people access them, and the demand for different products. Food spending patterns, the nutritional quality of people’s diets and levels of alcohol consumption may be changing. Longer-term impacts on health will be determined by whether households’ food consumption reverts to pre-crisis patterns when the food environment returns to normal.

The research will use data on more than 30,000 households, which will be updated bimonthly, documenting changes in food price, availability, spending and diet quality throughout the crisis.

Availability of certain key essentials and the variety of products stocked by supermarkets will be tracked over time. How prices are changing, and how these changes feed through into differences in households level price inflation will be documented. Patterns of food, drink and alcohol spending will be compared to pre-crisis levels, through analysis of food and drink consumption habits and the nutritional quality of households’ diets during the crisis. The research will show how any changes affect different groups, such as people with low incomes, people with children, and the elderly.

Assessing household-level patterns of food spending before, during and after the crisis will be crucial for understanding long-term effects and will inform policy that seeks to tackle diet-related disease and reduce health inequalities. This project will provide evidence while the coronavirus crisis is still ongoing, with the findings released in several short reports, each focusing on particular aspects of the analysis.