Increase in food

[cleo333]

We are finding the increase in food costs difficult and would like to know others thoughts on it , is it increased costs to the companies that have caused this and/or other companies following suit but don't need to ?

There are a lot of reasons, but three big ones are climate change, war and Brexit.

Take two ingredients that are in so many foods - wheat and vegetable oil.

Ukraine is a massive exporter of sunflower oil and wheat. Absolutely huge. Putin’s war means the crops are destroyed or neglected, exports are prevented, manpower isn’t available.
That means there’s a shortage of sunflower oil, so everything using that need a replacement, and prices of all cooking oils go up substantially. Ditto wheat.

Also cereals are used in animal feed, so raising livestock costs skyrocket.

Or take olive oil - we get most of ours from Spain. The last two years it’s been droughts and wildfires across Spain in the summer, destroying the potential olive crops. There’s a lot less oil to go around.

Add the increased costs and red tape that Brexit has caused for food coming from Europe, and any rational European producer will prioritise easier markets with their goods unless the prices are high enough to make it worth the hassle.

Thank you for that information

It's caused by countries printing money. Remember when the entire planet shut down and everyone got paid to stay at home... Now it's time to start paying some of it back through inflation.

I think it's partly greed. My favourite cheese has gone up by 40%.

Supermarket greed.

Yep 👍

What @CountingCrones said

Climate change is having an horrific effect on food prices. I live on a dairy farm and the cows aren’t even out now and it’s the end of May. So the farmer has to pay a ton to import feed because the fields are
still too soggy to grow crops to feed the cattle. That gets passed on to the consumer.

But it’s happened all over the world. Sugar crops, chocolate, oil, salad vegetables. You name it, somewhere in the world that we import it from has had a weather crisis.. Even rice, which has traditionally been stable (Italian rice).

Ukraine mainly affect grains and oils but also fertilizers. Those costs to farmers has gone up 250%. Which gets passed on.

And then on top there is Brexit. The worst is yet to come because importers and exporters had to start paying awful fees from April.

It is a perfect storm of awfulness.

I forgot to say, you are referring to profiteering. So there have been some companies who supermarkets thought were unreasonably putting up their prices far and beyond what they should have been, even when considering increased costs, and some supermarkets point blank refused to stock those items at those prices. There was a very public war about one product, I forget which.

Supermarkets have a lot of power and CAN put their foot down if they feel the consumer is being ripped off. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.

The worst people for profiteering over the last two years imo have been insurance companies, happily raising prices by 75-100% and blaming ‘the cost of everything’ as a justification. But if you look at their balance sheets, the £ they are paying out has dropped, whilst the £ they are giving to shareholders has gone up massively.

They are nothing but pirates.

I try to shop in local green grocers and butchers where I can. At least their stock hasn’t been stuck on the road for a week and is not absolutely minging by the time it gets to my house (I am looking at you, M&S - the last place I expected to buy food with a day long shelf life/rotting veg).

We have some local grocers who will deliver boxes. Have you looked into that?

That’s not why. Read @KievLoverTwo - or indeed, the news.

Cheese means milk and dairies.

Milk means well fed cows in good health, but with the awful weather they can’t graze on pasture. Farms are having to buy in feed. But all the farms are needing it, because the weather affected all the farms, so feed is scarce mr than usual and therefore even more ex. It costs a fortune to feed the nation’s dairy herds.

You know those crippling energy bills you’re paying? Dairies are hit with them too. But dairies (like other businesses) don’t get a handy government cap on prices. They just keep rising.

It’s not supermarkets doing this to us. I wish it were, that would be easier to address.

Prices are rising and rising. Inflation (ie the rate of how fast they get more expensive) is slowing down a bit, but the prices themselves are still going up with no end in sight.

Food producers aren’t getting rich from us, they’re going bust at rather worrying rates.

@ByCupidStunt

Exactly. Usually the farm brings in another farm’s sheep to graze for about six weeks in February. Fields are too wet, no sheep. From April there should be around 250-400 mature calfs getting the best of the nutrients from the grass all around us, for 5 months. Not a single cow to be seen, except for in the sheds, where they will probably have to be pumped full of expensive nutrients due to not getting the grass they need at their age. Plus all the extra feed for the time they cannot be grazing.

The fields all around me are ripped to shreds with tractor tracks where they have to keep trying to sow in the rain. So much so that the local large duck population are now using those tracks as mini ponds and are having a jolly old time.

(there are already many ponds here)

They took in a harvest last week in the rain, so they will now have to pay to get that harvest artificially dried, at great expense, because farms pay something daft like x3 the amount per kWh the average consumer pays, with no price caps. It’s volatile, with no fixed periods for them.

The same for oil to run the tractors. Remember when gas and electric went up by 25% in three months after Russia invaded Ukraine? Well we were living in a house on oil - it went from £0.45 to £1.30 in the same period - and again, there are no price caps or protections for people whose homes run on oil or whose equipment relies on red diesel.

Your cheese is going up because our climate is screwed.

Not a single animal in any field around us. It’s unbelievable.

People were only ever going to take climate change seriously when it hit them in the pocket. It seems that time is now.

(not all people, obviously)

@KievLoverTwo I have nothing but sympathy for you and your family - and your herd of course.

People just don’t think about the realities of food production. There are so many factors affecting viability. All those years campaigning for climate change and nothing bloody happened apart from tinkering around the edges.

Agree with all that’s been said but would also like to add…Tesco reported pre-tax profits hit £2.3bn, up from £882m the previous year. So unless I’m very wrong…Tesco (and most supermarkets) are profiting and increasing what customers pay on top of the increased costs of food production?

Not my family or business thankfully, just my LL’s. And I agree.