(CNN) -- An increase in the cost of food helped hike China's consumer price index to a 25-month high of 4.4 percent last month, the National Bureau of Statistics said Thursday, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency.
The growth rate in the CPI -- a gauge of inflation -- was 0.8 percentage points above September's rate, NBS spokesman Sheng Laiyun said.
Costs for food products, which represent a third of the goods used to calculate China's CPI, grew 10.1 percent compared to the previous year in October, the agency reported.
That compared with an 8 percent year-to-year growth in September, 7.5 percent in August, 6.8 percent in July and 5.7 percent in June, it said.
From January to October, China's CPI rose year on year by 3 percent, which represents the government's target ceiling for the year.
The producer price index for China's industrial products rose 5 percent year to year in October, 0.7 percentage points higher than September, said NBS spokesman Sheng.
