Mashed potato and leg waxing fall out of the inflation basket

SERVED with bangers or a traditional roast dinner it is a home-cooked classic that has for years required a strong arm to prepare.

But not any more, as ready-made mash sales have taken off at supermarkets because people have become too busy to mash their own potatoes, experts have said.

Prepared mashed potato has returned to the nation’s shopping basket after a 30-year absence, the Office for National Statistics revealed yesterday.

Back in the Seventies and Eighties no-mash mashed potato came in the form of Smash! powder, which faded from popularity in the Nineties.

Now mashed potato for people who prefer not to pummel the potatoes themselves comes in the form of ready-mashed chilled potato.

Over the course of 2014 shoppers bought £59 million worth of chilled mashed potato, rising by £17 million over the past year, Kantar Worldpanel research showed.

Ed Griffiths, consumer insight director at Kantar Worldpanel, said: “Sales of chilled, ready-made mashed potatoes have consistently climbed over the past three years, with the total market now valued at £76million.

“Consumers’ ever-busy lifestyles are having an impact on our spud of choice: the convenience of premashed potatoes is proving a winner as shoppers are able to have the home comforts of mash within minutes.”

Pork pies and pasties were moved out of the basket following health concerns over eating processed meat.

The ONS said they would now be classed under more general “meatbased snack” and “cooked pastrybased savoury snack” entries respectively.

Meanwhile quiche, a popular option among vegetarians, was moved into the ONS shopping basket. It said the decisions reflected a widening of choices across takeaway outlets. The price movements of 700 goods and services are measured in 20,000 UK outlets to calculate inflation. Also added to the list were women’s exercise leggings, raspberries and action video cameras such as Gopros.

Items removed include peaches and nectarines, leg waxing, bottles of lager in a nightclub and ATM charges. Commenting on the new items, Philip Gooding, a senior ONS statistician, said: “Every year we add new items to the basket to ensure that it reflects modern spending habits.

“We also update the weight each item has to ensure the overall inflation numbers reflect shoppers’ experiences of inflation. “However, while we add and remove a number of items each year, the overall change is actually quite small. “This year we changed 36 items out of a total basket of 714.”