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Food price inflation is driven by more than supply chain problems

Food Price Inflation

Interesting perspective referencing rising food prices coupled with stable and steady consumption along with labor issues. Food price inflation was higher in 2021 than in any year since 2008.

The following article was posted by: Pat Westhoff with Columbia Daily Tribune.
Titled: Food price inflation is driven by more than supply chain problems
URL: https://www.columbiatribune.com/story/business/columns/2022/01/23/food-price-inflation-driven-more-than-supply-chain-problems/6562533001/
Date Posted: January 23, 2022 6:48 AM CT

The key take-aways from the article are as follows:

  • Food price inflation was higher in 2021 than in any year since 2008.
  • The December consumer price index (CPI) for food was up 6.3 percent from the same month in the previous year.
  • Meat prices led the way, with beef prices up a remarkable 18.6 percent.
  • Meat consumption per person was almost exactly the same in 2021 as it was in 2020. Beef and chicken consumption each increased a little, while pork and turkey consumption fell slightly.
  • Labor costs and shortages have been an important factor as well
  • Combination of much higher prices and flat consumption leads to inflationary values

This article correlates some to our previous article: U.S. Food Prices Are Up. Are the Food Corporations to Blame for Taking Advantage? 

Costmenu can help restaurant owners and food service industries address the concerns noted above as we provide the following solutions:

Compare different meat product costs against each other.

Costmenu allows users to compare different ingredients such as meat products and their costs against each other and how they change the overall costs. This can be powerful information when needing to replace a more expensive product with another food item.

Compensate labor costs into your food cost estimates.

Costmenu provides two additional fields for waste and add-on percentages. These percentages can be used for adjustments in order to compensate for the other ancillary costs percentages such as labor, utility costs increase, and other factors associated with the food preparation and business items.

Cost-effective features by Costmenu.

The pricing options offered by Costmenu are flexible and will help provide the insight in order to make informed decisions on menu pricing, and where to cut costs elsewhere. Our system will pay for itself with the just information gleaned from analytics and we offer a 14-day free trial of the system.

About Costmenu:
Costmenu is a food/menu/recipe costing software that offer many advantages over excel spreadsheets and other inventory management programs. Costmenu integrates a powerful dashboard, food, prepared, and menu item costing features, menu building features, custom qr code label makers, document storage, event/catering management features, data security, performance measurement, data analysis and comparisons, CRM, and generation of various reports. For more information on Costmenu, visit https://costmenu.com, email sales@costmenu.com, or phone (949) 274-4814.