A stick of butter will really stick it to the budget these days, with a 500g block costing around $10 on Waiheke after butter prices nearly doubled over the past year.
Fenice owner and chef Tim Pickering says hospitality businesses, like his Oneroa restaurant, are feeling the pinch as food prices soar – and staples like butter skyrocket in price. Hospitality profit margins are always fairly thin, even in the best of times, so Tim says restaurants and cafés are between a rock and a hard place. If they put their own prices up too much and too quickly, customers stop coming in as often or at all, but if they put them up too slowly or too little, the rising costs wipe their profits out entirely and they go out of business. Tim says food price increases have become a “dreaded inevitability,” and butter in particular has shot up fast in the past few months.
Read the full story in Gulf News – out now!
