U.S. Food Prices Are Up. Are the Food Corporations to Blame for Taking Advantage?

The article talks about rising food prices and possible connections with monopolistic practices for rise in food cost. 2021 was a bad year for grocery bills. Shoppers paid 6.4% more for groceries in November 2021 compared to November 2020, according to the consumers.

The following article was posted by: CLAIRE KELLOWAY with Time Magazine.
Titled: Food Prices Are Up. Are the Food Corporations to Blame for Taking Advantage
URL: https://time.com/6139127/u-s-food-prices-monopoly/
Date Posted: January 14, 2022 7:00 AM EST

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

• Food companies do face legitimate increased costs and unique shortages.
• Food companies say rising prices are merely free markets at work - extreme weather and pandemic disruptions increased production costs and diminished the supply of food while demand increased in the U.S. and abroad as people started to emerge from the pandemic.
• Food companies do face legitimate increased costs and unique shortages, but these aren't eating into their profits as economists might expect.
• Food production has consolidated dramatically since the 1970's after changes in antitrust policy allowed more companies to buy up their competitors.
• Article claims that food suppliers are recording record profits
• The government claims to be looking into it
• If the pandemic taught us anything it's that the food supply is only as secure as its workers are.

This news piece correlates to our previous blog posted recently: Food is more expensive than it has been in decades

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

Keep historical records of food costs.

Costmenu allows users to track food cost and prepared item costs are critical to make sure menu items are priced right in order to get the proper returns. See in real time increases and how they relate to historical prices. Whether is it inflation, market demands or presumed monopolistic practices, monitoring food costs and adjusting menu prices is critical.

Compare different ingredients and food items against each other.

Costmenu allows users to compare different ingredients and their costs against each other and how they influence the overall costs. This can be useful when needing to replace a more expensive product with another food item.

Monitor and rate your food providers

As noted in our prior articles, keeping records on your vendors can really help you determine how effective or fairly you are being serviced. Using Costmenu will allow you to monitor your purchases and the costs associated with them. In addition to the costs, you can track the service level as well. It is one thing to have to pay more for an item due to supply and demand, but you surely do not have to endure poor service while doing so.

Costmenu's features are very cost-effective.

Costmenu's pricing options are very cost-effective 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. If Costmenu can save you money, then you can pass that savings along to your customers and allow them to go back out and enjoy your services.

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.