Anh Huynh

Inflation has been a headache for most people, especially for the restaurant industry. Since COVID-19 hit, a lot of item prices had skyrocketed hurting a lot of businesses. The thing about food prices is that whenever some food prices go up out of thin air, the restaurant management got to consider how to deal with it instead of keeping updating the price to make a profit. Recently, there is a national wide lettuce shortage that affecting not only consumers who buy it individually but also restaurants that use salad for customers’ entrees. My choice of industry is restaurant and lettuce shortage has been a big issue for many kinds of restaurants. Due to a dry growing season in California followed by a virus that killed crops that makes one lettuce head price now tripled its price. This shortage is a challenge for many restaurants since lettuce is necessary and it’s struggling to get stock even if the price is way above their budget. Usually, buying in bundles seems to be cheaper compared to individually but in that case, is the opposite for restaurants that buy lettuce in cases because now one case of lettuce could cost around $150, almost triple the price back then (Dawson, 2022). As a big food chains like Taco Bell and Chic fil a, they are facing the same challenge and they decide to go public about their problem instead of quietly changing the item price. For some meals that were prepped with a lot of lettuce, they put announce under the description, so customers know and not expecting to have lettuce instead of raising the item price and still having a little amount of lettuce in the meal (Meisenzahl, 2022). The way they face the challenge is very professional using the sense of what customers really want and feel. Customers are hard to please sometimes but most of the time they will understand the situation.

References

Dawson, T. (2022, Nov 17).Lettuce prices skyrocket amid shortage of romaine and iceberg. Retrieved from https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/lettuce-prices-in-canada

Meisenzahl, M. (2022, Nov 11).Taco Bell and Chick-fil-A are warning customers about a lettuce shortage that could impact their orders. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.in/retail/news/taco-bell-and-chick-fil-a-are-warning-customers-about-a-lettuce-shortage-that-could-impact-their-orders/articleshow/95436804.cms

Micah Diaz

With inflation already through the roof due to Covid and multiple bills passed to print more money into our economy, our dollar has been weakened more than ever. Now we are getting hit in our food costs due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If Russia continues to attack Ukraine, food scarcity due to crop failure is a future possibility. Russia’s invasion is not causing crop failure because Ukraine can not grow crops; it is because Russia is tied up in war and won't distribute fertilizer. Russia is one of the nation's largest suppliers of fertilizer and without them being on the board, prices are sent rising and some fertilizers can’t even be found anymore. Farmers are forced to switch their crops, use less fertilizer or simply let their crops die. Other countries have already looked at trying to solve this problem independently but are stuck with having to wait multiple years and spend billions to achieve it.

Now as many of you know Trump has submitted his bid to run for re-election, and he plans to drop gas and food costs again if reelected. If Russia can't come to an agreement with other countries on reopening ports to distribute fertilizer how will Trump’s project be successful? Trump will either have to boost U.S production as we are the third largest producer of fertilizer, and we can then start exporting our fertilizer and watch other countries pay us millions. The U.S. is also using less fertilizer year after year as we create different technology so it is not needed as much. So we can continue to innovate to become less fertilizer independent or Trump will have to come to terms with a deal with Russia.

Refrences

CC0, C. S. (2021, December 13).Too many to count: Factors driving fertilizer prices higher and higher. American Farm Bureau Federation - The Voice of Agriculture. Retrieved November 18, 2022, from https://www.fb.org/market-intel/too-many-to-count-factors-driving-fertilizer-prices-higher-and-higher

Jenkins, S. (2022, October 4).How the russia-ukraine war helped fuel record fertilizer prices. Saint Louis Fed Eagle. Retrieved November 18, 2022, from https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/2022/oct/russia-ukraine-war-record-fertilizer-prices

Northam, J. (2022, September 28).How the war in Ukraine is affecting the world's supply of Fertilizer. NPR. Retrieved November 18, 2022, from https://www.npr.org/2022/09/28/1125525861/how-the-war-in-ukraine-is-affecting-the-worlds-supply-of-fertilizer

Ukraine exports of FERTILIZERS2022 data 2023 forecast 1996-2021 historical. Ukraine Exports of fertilizers - 2022 Data 2023 Forecast 1996-2021 Historical. (n.d.). Retrieved November 18, 2022, from https://tradingeconomics.com/ukraine/exports/fertilizers