IMPROVING LIVES THROUGH DATA ECOSYSTEMS

In honour of cake day on 26 November, we are taking a fresh look at the latest price data of this popular dessert. Stats SA published a story on the price of cake in July 2015, we now look at how prices have changed since then.

Interestingly, there hasn’t been any big changes. The average price of a cake in June 2015 was R47,34, according to price data. This increased to R47,46 in October 2015. In other words, you would have paid, on average, 12c (or 0,3%) more for cake in October than you did in June.

Cake is one of a number of items in the product group called “bread and cereals” that appears in Stats SA’s monthly Consumer price index (CPI) release. Over the same period, the price index of this group rose by 2,3%. So cake isn’t doing too badly compared with this group as a whole.

What about other sweets? Let’s arbitrarily choose two other tasty dessert-like foods: chocolate and ice cream, and look at prices over a longer period, since January 2013. To make meaningful comparisons, the January 2013 prices in the chart below have been set to an index of 100. The price of an 80 gram slab of chocolate, represented by the red line, has risen much faster than the prices of both ice cream and cake.

The average price of an 80 gram slab of chocolate was R8,11 in January 2013. The same slab would have set you back R12,33 in October 2015, a rise of 52%.

Ice cream rose by 20% over the same period, from R38,04 to R45,65 for a 2-litre tub. The average price of a cake, on the other hand, climbed by 16%, from R40,77 to R47,46. Count yourself lucky if you prefer cake to chocolate or ice cream.

Those of you planning to go out to celebrate cake day in the Western Cape can consider yourselves doubly lucky. On average, cake is cheaper there than in any other province. The average price of a cake in Western Cape was R33,70 in October 2015, much cheaper than the R60,16 recorded for Northern Cape.

Of course, the key word to keep in mind when interpreting these prices is average. Every month price collectors from Stats SA visit retail outlets around the country to record thousands of prices for items ranging from food and beverages to clothing and household appliances. The data are used to compile Stats SA’s monthly consumer price indices. Cake is one of these items, and the price of R47,46 recorded for October 2015 is a national average of all cake prices collected that month.

Click here to visit the download page for the latest Consumer Price Index release.

Click here for the story on cake prices published in July 2015.