Kate Hawkesby: The powers that be tell us food prices will come down soon, I hope that's true

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Recorded11 May 2023

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So I’m not sure the Mother’s Day brunch this weekend will be including avocado on toast given the shortage of them – and therefore the cost of them. Although despite avocado being $9 and $10 each in some parts of the country at the moment, other places tell me they can still get them and get them cheap. So it might be a case of the old postcode lottery at the moment when it comes to fruit and veges. But yesterday we heard that we’ve had our largest food price increase since 1987. The cost of food in New Zealand is now up 12.5 percent. And of that, fruit and veges were the biggest driver – up 22.5 percent. Grocery food prices are up 14 percent on this time last year. “Increasing prices for barn or cage-raised eggs, potato chips, and 6-pack yoghurt were the largest drivers within grocery food,” it was reported. And don’t we know it. It‘s us the consumers who feel the pinch of this at the sharp end, as we empty our trolley onto the checkout conveyor belt and look on in horror as the prices get rung up. We feel like everything’s costing more.. because it is. But it’s been a perfect storm of factors – bad weather, supply chain issues, freight costs, minimum wage increases, compliance cost increases all resulting in us getting loaded up with higher price points on just about everything. We didn’t actually realise how bad this was until we left New Zealand and travelled and saw arguably more expensive cities in the world with far cheaper food prices. Blueberries in London – 2 large punnets for 3 pounds. Even for six New Zealand dollars you could only get one small punnet of blueberries if you were lucky. Raspberries the same. Bread and milk cheaper, pretty much all food cheaper bar meat. But no matter where you go, people still whinge about the price of stuff and think their cost of living crisis is worse than anyone else’s. In the UK they complain night and day about their cost of living crisis and the price of food and we’re there thinking – are you kidding? Try buying this in New Zealand! So I guess to an extent the grass is always greener somewhere else – and sometimes is actually is. But you can’t argue with the quality of our produce here. I know I don’t think twice about eating New Zealand grass fed meat but I wouldn’t always feel good about eating meat overseas, same with our dairy. We can also drink water from our taps without too many concerns. But there’s always going to be a premium attached to good quality, high standard food, like sustainably farmed meat and dairy. And most of the time consumers understand and accept that. But the other thing we could do more of I suppose is eat in season – which these days we’re not that good at, because we expect everything to be available to us all of the time. Like avocados. And usually growers can bridge the seasonal gaps with extra supply, but not when bad weather hits. The powers that be tell us these prices will all come back down – and I hope that’s true – I hope they understand that just because we’re paying more for fruit and veges now, doesn’t mean we want to keep paying through the nose for food forever.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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