Food commodities: moving toward price normalization?

In 2025, food commodities stood out for posting sharp price increases, against a broadly downward trend in overall purchasing input prices. On a year-on-year basis, food raw material prices rose by nearly +10% compared with 2024, while over the same period the overall commodity index declined by -6%.

The contrasting dynamics characterizing these two price aggregates, food commodities versus total commodities, are even more evident in the chart below.

Food Prices vs. Total Commodity Prices Comparison

Following the price surge cycle of 2021-2022, food commodities experienced only a brief downward phase and, from the first months of 2024, resumed their upward trajectory, reaching peak levels in March of last year.

The two peak episodes, however, have different underlying drivers. The first peak, recorded in 2022, reflected broad-based price increases affecting all food product categories, mainly driven by global value chain bottlenecks and rising fertilizer costs. The second peak, observed in 2025, was instead linked to supply deficits affecting tropical commodities, particularly cocoa (see the article Cocoa prices: moving toward normalization?) and coffee.

As outlined in the PricePedia Scenario for January 2026, food commodity prices are expected to decline over both 2026 and 2027, reflecting a normalization phase amid overall less strained supply conditions.
Given the heterogeneous dynamics that have driven prices across different food product categories since 2024, it is useful to examine the expected price trends for the coming two-year period on a disaggregated basis.

To this end, the table below reports the annual percentage price changes in euro for the aggregated food commodity indices included in the PricePedia Outlook.

Table 1: Annual Percentage Changes (%) of Aggregated PricePedia Food Indices, in Euro

The table clearly highlights the differentiated price dynamics across individual food commodity groups over the past year.

Even among substitute goods such as cereals, 2025 shows divergent trends. On the one hand, wheat prices declined by -2.2% year on year; on the other, prices of other cereals, corn in particular, increased by more than +7%, due to drought conditions affecting major South American corn producers in the first part of the year.
For both wheat and other cereals, prices are forecast to decline by more than -6% in 2026, due to expectations of higher supplies. In 2027, however, wheat demand growth is forecast to outpace supply growth, pushing prices slightly above 2025 levels.

As for oils and fats, last year saw a price decline of -7%, driven by improved supply conditions, particularly for olive oil following the record highs reached in 2024 (see Update of edible oil prices to November 2024 for further details). Over the next two years, prices are expected to resume an upward trend. In particular, price support is also expected to come from the increasing use of vegetable oils as biofuels.

Over the next two years, glucose prices are also expected to increase, by an average of around +2.5% per year, after having reached a floor in May 2025. By contrast, soybean prices are expected to continue along the downward trend that began in 2022, adjusting to lower levels driven by financial prices for soybean meal and soybeans.