Melons and sweet potatoes have been added to the shopping basket used to measure UK inflation, with items such as sat navs and yoghurt drinks being removed to make room.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) updates its basket of goods and services every year to keep pace with changing spending habits, meaning joining the exotic fruit and vegetable on the list this year are e-cigarettes, headphones and music streaming subscriptions.
Other additions include chilled pizza, which replaces frozen pizza, as spending on chilled pizzas has risen above spending on the frozen alternative.
The inflation basket dates back almost 70 years, and now includes 703 goods and services.
Using the shopping basket, the ONS collects around 110,000 individual prices each month from 20,000 shops across the UK, as well as a further 70,000 prices online to assess how fast prices are rising and falling.
It then uses weights for each item – their relative importance in calculating inflation – based on survey evidence of people’s spending, and comes up with an inflation number for the whole economy.
The latest data showed inflation at a record low of 0.3 per cent on the consumer price index measure.
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