We are gathering data about the availability and cost of staple gluten free products (pasta, bread, flour mixes) when shopping instore and online and want to capture your personal experiences. This data is essential to provide useful and relevant information to support our engagement with the food industry during Phase Two of our Cost of Living Campaign, help us to improve our services and bring positive change.  

Different types of bread loaves means different brands and different recipes, for example, Genius soft white farmhouse, Genius soft brown farmhouse, Sainsbury's multi-seed sourdough cob, Promise soft white loaf. This study only wants to capture information on ‘loaves’ of bread and does not include rolls or any other ‘bread type’ product such as wraps, pittas, fruit loaf.  

Not all loaves of bread are the same size and weight so the best way to spot the cheapest loaf is to look at the price tag on the edge of the shelf – this will have ‘per 100g’ in small type. When recording the price, please include the actual price and weight.

There are ‘don’t know’ options within the survey, so just complete as much as you can. And don’t worry if you don’t know the store postcode, we just need enough information to identify the specific store, so if you can include the store name, street and area so that the store can’t be confused with another store that will be great.   The questions with red stars are mandatory – you must answer these to successfully submit the survey.

A top-up shop is when you go shopping in between your main shop to get extra products that you might have run out of or forgotten about during your main shop. Sourcing products unavailable in previous shop refers to when you are unable to buy certain products and must go somewhere else to purchase these products. 

Often if products have promotions e.g. temporary price discounts, there will be a ticket on the shelf telling you about the promotion. Most promotions for ‘free from’ products are found in their usual shelf space. However, it’s good to know that some price reductions due to short shelf life may be found in a separate designated area for that store.   

When product has sold out, it’s classified as ‘out of stock’. If the shelf area is empty, it may mean that the store has run out of the product until their next delivery, or that the store hasn’t yet had the chance to replenish stock. Either way the shelf labels are usually still there so you can still see what product should be on the shelf or there may be an out of stock label.

Coeliac UK funded the initial project of Professor Bob Anderson which identified the most important gluten peptides causing problems for people with coeliac disease. This research formed the basis of further research and eventually the development of the NexVax2 vaccine.  

Unfortunately, this work was halted in 2019 as results showed that it did not provide sufficient protection to gluten exposure. Coeliac UK is committed to funding research which provides a greater understanding of the disease process to identify new targets for treatment or a cure. 

The most useful shots to enable completion of the survey are one shot of the whole fixture, and close up shots of the shelves of bread loaves, flour mixes and pasta – including the price tags on the shelf edges. You can see some examples on this page in 1. Complete our Shopping Survey​.