The price of food

Went to the supermarket early this morning and to my delight found a leg of New Zealand lamb on special. It being Sunday I thought why not have a Sunday roast apart from the obvious downside of it being a lovely summer day and it must be about 22 degrees centigrade outside.
 

I am not sure what the price will be for lamb this year but I gather last year it was about $60 NZ. We had a very bad storm in early spring and lost about1.5 million lambs so there are predictions that the price might reach as high $100 NZ.

Lets be generous and say the farmer who raised the lamb got $70 NZ. Then someone had to kill the lamb, butcher it pack it and send it to the supermarket. I accept that there has been a bit of value added along the way I am going to be bloody generous and assign $30 bucks to that.

The price I paid for the leg of lamb was $19.80 but that was reduced from $31.35. Lets stay with the actual price of $31.35 multiply it by 2 and we are at $62.70 chuck in the other high value cuts such as the lamb cutlets another favourite of mine and I would suggest that we have pretty much covered the cost of the lamb. There is a hell of a lot of value in the remaining cuts of meat and lets not forget the liver tastes great with sausages. Someone is making a hell of a lot of money  and I don’t think it the farmers or the guys who work the chains at the freezing works. I think that the works are owned collectively by the farmers so I guess they would be in line for a dividend. What I would love to know is how much are the retailers taking. My guess is more than half of the processed value of the sheep is going to the supermarkets. There staff are paid at the minimum wage.

I already had the onion so I haven’t a clue what that cost. Kumara ( sweet potato ) was $1.64 the potato was $0.54 and the carrot $0.50. I will deal only with the potato mine cost 0.54 and weighs in at 0.183 Kg the highest price I could find that was paid for potato’s was $2.00 per KG the lowest $0.90 again let’s be generous and go with the $1.50 per Kilo 3 average potato’s get you to that point and you have reached about 0.5 kg of potatoes. The only real other cost to the retailer is driving them across town to the supermarket. Again someone is making a hell of a lot of money and on those figures it isn’t the guys growing the potatoes so it must again be the retailers.
 

I also bought a middle of the road Australian quaffer chardonnay at $6.99 reduced from $14.30. I am guessing this is a loss leader from the supermarket or at least not a profit maker it is probably what they pay per bottle and I am also guessing that the Australians pay a hell of a lot more than $6.99 per bottle or Jacob’s Creek would be going under big time. 

Now this is amusing on one level and horrifying on another. I think it’s great we can buy Aussie wine at about and again I am guessing a third of the price they pay. The biggest social problems in New Zealand come down to excessive alcohol consumption.

Dessert will be apple crumble not my own this time

 

I bought this from the baker at the end of the road for $2.50 I don’t think the baker is making huge money but it is interesting to note he is selling a french stick at $0.50 less than the supermarket and while I bet it costs me more than 0.50 cents in fuel I feel good about supporting his business and his product is far better. What is apple crumble without cream
 

300 mls at a cost of $1.98 about what I pay for a litre of milk so I am guessing the margins aren’t quite as high and I am buying the cheapest brand. My guess would be about a 30% mark up here. OK to the nearest $ I am going to pay about $35 for tonight’s dinner and I will get probably 2 more meals out of this for an additional few dollars so those meals will end up with an average cost of about $13.50.

That is still bloody expensive. And if I gave the meal a really good Australian Shiraz that it deserves rather than modest chardonnay I could easily bang another $40 on top of this along with a hell of a hangover .

OK my point is that New Zealand has two large supermarket chains and up here in Auckland they don’t bother to compete in Dunedin they compete like hell and that is a function of geography but up here it is each take a suburb and price gouge as much as they can to the poor bloody consumer. I would suggest that the people who grow the food aren’t getting a great deal out of them either. They pay their employees crap money. The Australian owned crowd have this promotion going on with a typical Kiwi family all very white and middle class. That isn’t the face of their workforce they are female and they have brown faces. They can’t even be stuffed employing enough of them, these women are really being exploited. So you can wait up to twenty minutes to get through the express lanes but 1/2 the bloody checkouts are closed including two express way checkouts.

I think I might ask Ele Ludeman  from the Home Paddock blog to have a read of this and then we might get a perspective from a person who actually grows the lambs and has actual knowledge rather than my speculation