Dan (the food industry CEO)

I mean, packaging is more expensive.

We've talked about that.

It's not as unavailable as it once was, but it's a lot more expensive.

commodities are way up you know coffee pork you name it the prices are just through the roof right now a lot of that goes back to labor you know food companies need to turn out a lot of product as cheaply as possible we don't have

typically speaking you know the food industry isn't sitting on 75 margins right like some electronics companies are food industry typically operates on very very slim margins because if you start increasing your margin another company is going to come along really quickly and smack you down and

chair.

People just don't handle food price increases very well unless you're in the premium or specialty space.

So

For these companies, you know, they're trying their best not to raise prices, but what's happening and what has happened over the last, you know, 12 to 14 months or so is many, many, many of these companies have gone out of business.

Particularly the smaller and the mid-sized companies.

Food companies, and I say food companies to mean producers, manufacturers, you name it, just everyone kind of in that space.

Especially those who relied on food service in any way for their income.

You know, if your income was half food service and half brick and mortar retail, you got destroyed over the past year.

And so a lot of those have gone out of business.

Sure.

Yeah, let me...

put a little bit of a finer point on the companies that have been closing.

And then we can continue on to other things that are informing that inflation and causing it.

There are no good firm numbers on how many food manufacturing companies have closed in the last 15 months or so since COVID became a thing.

But it's been thousands of restaurants and hundreds or thousands, my guess would be in the thousands of food manufacturing companies.