Crêpes, Naleśniki, Pannenkoeken, Palačinke, Pfannkuchen – Pancakes are widely loved in Europe. Your country’s stack is built from two numbers: the cost of flour, milk, eggs and butter and median disposable income.

We assume nobody lives on pancakes alone, so we use five per cent of a day’s income as a common yardstick. The rankings and changes in affordability would remain the same if a different percentage of daily income were used.

No country has lost as much of its pancake stack as Germany.

The index reveals that absolute pancake prices have risen everywhere. And in many countries, incomes haven’t kept pace, meaning pancakes have become harder to afford in nearly half of the 28 countries we looked at.

But not all European countries have been affected equally. And a second group of countries is struggling. Here is what the Pancake Index tells you about food affordability.

Let’s assume you live in Germany, you earn a median income, and you like pancakes. You take five per cent of a day’s income and spend it on flour, eggs, milk and butter to make a batch. Check out the recipe for our European Standard Pancake here.

In 2016, you could afford to make an estimated 18 pancakes.

The Pancake Index shows why food prices are a problem across almost all of Europe

In Austria, you could afford to make 18¼ pancakes, while in North Macedonia it was only 2¾. This shows how dramatically food affordability differs across Europe.

The data reveals two groups of countries.

In the first group, people feel frustrated at the supermarket because prices rose faster than incomes. In real terms, people in countries like Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands or Norway can therefore afford less eggs or flour than they used to.

Meanwhile, people in the second group feel the same frustration, but for a different reason: even when median incomes grew faster than food prices, they did so from a very low starting point. So in 2026, a median income in Greece, Bulgaria or Romania still buys far fewer pancakes than in the countries at the top of the ranking.

This explains why food prices are a hot topic across Europe.

Not every country fits neatly into these two groups. Austria and Ireland already ranked at the top, and in these countries pancakes have become even more affordable since 2016. Portugal and Slovakia went the other way: they weren’t top earners, and affordability fell even further.

The pancake gap exists not only between countries, but within them too. The pancake gap shows how many pancakes the richest fifth can afford for every pancake the poorest fifth can afford. This gap widened in nine countries and narrowed in 16. It stayed roughly the same in three countries.

The smaller a household’s budget, the larger the proportion spent on food – and the harder the impact of rising prices. Additionally, cheaper products have risen in price faster than premium brands in several countries, meaning consumers who had switched to cheaper brands to save money have ultimately faced steeper price increases.

Over the past few years, food prices in general have risen faster than overall consumer prices, outpaced only by energy. And once they go up, they tend to stay up: when inflation slows, prices don’t fall. They just continue to rise more slowly.

And it keeps happening: the recent standoff between the US and Iran over the Strait of Hormuz has caused energy prices to shoot up once again.

A Threat called Climateflation

Another major factor is extreme weather. Agriculture has always swung between good and bad harvests, but floods, storms and droughts are intensifying with the climate crisis, and scientists expect global warming to keep adding to food price inflation.

The hot, dry summer of 2026 cost the UK and EU an estimated 23 million tonnes of grain production, World Grain reports.

Meteorologists also warn that the upcoming El Niño could be the strongest on record, raising the risk of crop losses across the Global South as droughts and floods disrupt harvests.

Economists have even coined a term for it: climateflation.

What can be done about high food prices? Part of the answer lies in understanding why food prices move so differently across Europe, despite these countries all being connected by the same global markets.

A lot of it comes down to a country’s dependence on fossil fuels, says macroeconomist Silke Tober of the German Hans Böckler Foundation. Food production consumes energy at every step – from the energy-intensive production of fertiliser, to harvesting wheat and milling flour, to cooling and transporting milk to the supermarket.

The more this energy is generated with costly fossil fuels, the stronger the impact of energy price shocks on food prices.

“Italy and Germany rely heavily on natural gas, so we see a strong effect there,” Tober explains. Spain, by contrast, invested massively in renewable energy and successfully decoupled its electricity price from the price of gas. “Renewable energy makes a huge difference,” she says.

Wages as a Price Driver

But part of that advantage has been eaten up by the other major risk factor for food prices: the climate crisis. The 2024 floods in Spain’s Valencia region are estimated to have caused well over a billion euros in damage to crops alone. Making matters worse, several hundred thousand acres of forest and farmland burned in wildfires in both 2025 and 2026.

Other factors shaping price differences between countries include transport distances, wages in the food sector, VAT rates and animal disease outbreaks. Between December 2025 and February 2026, almost 16 million poultry died or were culled on infected farms across Europe. Most of the cases involving wild and farm birds were detected in Poland, Germany and France.

Retailers’ expectations of customer behaviour play a role too, says Anne Margarian, a researcher at the Thünen Institute of Market Analysis in Germany: “Prices also reflect how easily customers could find a cheaper alternative for a certain product.” This can differ between countries and income groups as well as individual products.

Profits and Market Power

The picture is less clear when it comes to retailers’ profit margins. In Germany, the Monopolies Commission concluded that large food retailers’ margins increased as prices rose.

For the eurozone, ECB researchers found that even after accounting for energy and commodity costs, “a significant part of the surge in food inflation remains unexplained” – a gap they attribute to domestic factors like wages and profits, which their model can’t fully capture due to a lack of reliable data.

Should governments intervene in the food market at all? Yes, Margarian says – when there are structural reasons for price increases.

To avoid future price shocks, Tober says the most effective measure is to become as independent of fossil fuels as possible.

But even with renewables alone, extreme weather events are likely to continue damaging harvests in the future. “We need to strengthen methods, crops and technologies that are adapted to the changing climate – and are themselves climate-neutral, so as not to add further to global warming,” Margarian says.

Consumers in Europe will likely need to prepare for higher food prices in the future. “When climate change impairs agricultural productivity, costs will rise and so will prices. This is expected to hit the poorest hardest,” Margarian says.

While tackling the root causes could prevent higher prices in the future, governments also aim to soften the blow for citizens in the present.

Price caps can ease the burden to some extent, Tober says. And customers tend to notice them more because when they work, prices actually fall. But they can have side effects.

Hungary capped prices on products like flour, sugar and meat “to protect families” – but failed to stop the overall food inflation from rising. Austria and Sweden cut VAT on unprocessed food. But economists are doubtful, for two reasons. Firstly, a VAT cut for restaurant meals in Germany cost taxpayers roughly €4 billion yet barely changed prices, because restaurants kept the savings instead of passing them on to customers. Why would supermarkets be different?

Secondly, broad measures like this benefit every income group, including those who don’t need the help. The same money would go further if channelled into helping only those in need.

Many economists, as well as the IMF, favour more targeted tools instead, such as direct transfers to the lowest income groups: they’re more cost-effective, don’t distort price signals, and don’t additionally raise demand. Several countries have already used such measures to cushion the impact of high energy prices; Denmark has issued food vouchers to low-income households.

2027: A new high in food prices?

European governments will likely face this question again soon: economic researchers and ECB experts alike expect food prices to hit a new high in 2027.

Meaning your pancake stack could shrink even further.