THE INFLATIONARY PROCESS AND THE DYNAMICS OF FOOD CONSUMPTION IN BRAZIL: ECONOMIC, CLIMATIC AND CONSUMER BEHAVIOR ASPECTS

With the intensification of competition, technologies related to market intelligence and its processes have become essential for companies to remain in the market, for example, through continuous information about inflation and customer shopping behavior. This paper aims to identify the factors that most influenced the increase in price of the five vegetables that had higher inflation rates in the first half of 2013. It also presents the ten categories of processed food with highest decrease in volume consumed, listing possible factors for the negative performance of these products. For this purpose, explanatory research of a quantitative nature was carried out using data from the National Index of Price to the Ample Consumer and information from a consumption panel of 8,200 Brazilian households. As main result, we observed that the decline in consumption of certain items did not occur homogeneously in different socioeconomic classes. It varied depending on specifics in each group. As a conclusion, it was found that other factors, besides the price increase, played an important role in the reduction of consumption, such as changes linked to the demand for products with higher added value and convenience.