DECO's Basket of 63 Grocery Staples Reaches €253.60, With Food Prices Still Rising 5.4% a Year

The weekly grocery run keeps getting more expensive. The basket of 63 everyday food items that DECO PROTeste (the Portuguese Consumer Protection Association) has tracked in the same set of supermarkets for years reached €253.60 in the week of 5 August — its highest reading of 2026, and a fresh reminder that the pandemic-era jump in food prices has never fully unwound.

The week-on-week move was tiny, just €0.12, but the longer view is where the pressure shows. Compared with the same week a year ago, shoppers now need €12.95 more to fill the identical basket — a 5.38% rise that runs well ahead of headline inflation. Since January alone the basket has climbed €11.77, or 4.87%, meaning most of this year's increase has landed in barely seven months.

Three products did most of the damage over the past week: dry garlic rose 8% to €3.34, sliced ham 6% to €2.45, and sliced bread 5% to €2.58. But the more revealing numbers are the year-on-year swings on Portuguese staples. Cod (bacalhau) — the fish woven into the country's Christmas and Sunday tables — is up 25% over twelve months, at €20.02 a kilo. Sea bass has risen 21% to €9.90, and Nile perch 19% to €12.02. Fish, in other words, is quietly becoming a luxury.

Zoom out to the start of 2022, before energy costs and war-driven supply shocks rippled through the food chain, and the scale of the shift becomes stark. Beef for stewing has risen 120% in that stretch, to €12.80 a kilo. Cod is up 89%. A box of eggs — long the cheapest protein on the shelf — has climbed 78% to €2.03. These are not rounding errors; they are structural changes in what it costs to eat in Portugal, and they fall hardest on households where food is the largest slice of the monthly budget.

Why does the basket keep drifting up even as official inflation cools? Part of it is that food prices are sticky: once a supplier or retailer raises a shelf price to cover higher feed, fuel or labour costs, it rarely comes back down when those inputs ease. Part of it is Portugal's exposure to imported protein and animal feed, priced in global markets. And part of it is drought and heat, which this summer have again strained domestic production of everything from vegetables to the sardines and other fish that anchor the Portuguese diet.

What This Means for Expats

• Your grocery budget is the honest inflation gauge. Headline CPI has moderated, but the DECO basket shows food specifically is still rising above 5% a year. If you moved to Portugal expecting cheap supermarkets, budget for meaningfully higher weekly spend than 2022-era guides suggest.
• Fish is no longer the bargain. Bacalhau at €20 a kilo and sea bass near €10 mean the traditional "eat what the locals eat to save money" advice has limits. Frozen and own-brand lines, and cheaper species like mackerel and sardines in season, stretch a budget further than the headline fish.
• Discounter and own-label loyalty pays. The gap between branded and store-brand staples has widened as prices rose. Pingo Doce, Continente and the German discounters compete hard on own-label basics — the single easiest lever most households have.
• It compounds with housing. Food inflation lands on top of rising asking rents and a 2.5% rent-increase coefficient set for 2027. For fixed-income residents in particular, the combined squeeze is larger than any single index implies.

With drought conditions persisting and no sign of the post-2022 price ratchet reversing, the basket is unlikely to fall back to where it started the year. For a country that still markets itself abroad as an affordable place to live, the weekly cost of dinner is becoming one of the more stubborn arguments against that reputation — even as wages and employment slowly improve. Households looking to shelter savings from the erosion, meanwhile, have leaned on state savings certificates, whose rate ticked up again this month.