This week, I have spent a lot of time looking at the retail price of organic food and drink in the top five supermarkets.

To see the (organic) fruits of my labours you will have to wait until this weekend’s copy of The Grocer lands on your doormat, desk or digital device – but I will share a couple of observations in advance.

Firstly, as a journalist who rarely reports on fresh produce and virtually never buys meat (my wife is veggie so I tend to have a mainly meat-free diet at home), I was shocked by the very high premium paid for some organic meat compared with the category average.

Secondly, the price of many organic foods has risen more steeply than non-organic products in the same category.

This got me wondering how much of the widely reported growth in the value of the organic market in 2013 – as announced by the Soil Association last week – was down to price inflation rather than shoppers buying more organic goods in supermarkets.

It turns out it’s not an easy question to answer – the Soil Association only tracks sales by value given the difficulties in measuring overall volumes in a market as diverse as organic food and drink.

The association did say that volume sales of organic milk had grown about 2% in the supermarkets, where they account for about 5% of the category. Anecdotally, it added, staple organic fruit & veg such as carrots and tomatoes were up by volume in the grocers, while volume sales of organic meat, fish and poultry had been fairly flat.

What is clear is that a fair bit of the growth in organic is not from the supermarkets but from independent retailers and the increasingly popular box delivery schemes (in the case of the latter, I try to balance the working class chip on my shoulder with the fact I receive a weekly delivery of organic fruit and veg including such middle-class fare as celeriac). Organic box scheme sales were also proving popular with younger consumers – ‘the under-35, Jamie Oliver generation’, suggested one expert.

Could growth through channels such as box schemes and delis – if coming at the expense of mainstream supermarkets – mean organic was becoming even more middle-class, I asked the Soil Association? Particularly as the supermarkets’ share of the organic market has dropped from 80% to about 70% in the past decade.

In response, it insisted it was seeing sales of organic food to all demographics – but admitted a bias towards ABC1 consumers, major cities and the South East.

Personally, having looked in some detail at the price of organic goods, I find it easy to imagine that the organic market – or at least parts of it – could become even more the preserve of the better-off in future.

Whether this happens is very much in the hands of the supermarkets and how strongly they get back behind the organic market as the UK recovers from the economic downturn. (Some mults, of course, are already more supportive of organic than others.)

As the Soil Association told me today: “The success of organic food in the supermarkets is down to availability. It sells when it’s on shelf.”

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