Here’s a facet of your life you probably don’t give much thought to – pizza prices. You call up the local pizza joint, order your $15 pizza, and soon you are eating a tasty treat made to your specifications (or at least, close to what you wanted), right? Well, cheese prices are up, and now with a rise in wheat prices, there’s a good chance that pizza you depend on (well, in my house we depend on it once every 7-10 days at a minimum) will soon go up in price, too.
Players big, small and in between in the $30 billion-plus industry are feeling the heat as they figure out how to deal with the double-barrel price spikes of the gooey and grainy commodities without sacrificing their quality, competitive edge or customer loyalty.
Now to us non-pizza-making peons, it might be hard to imagine how this could have such a big impact on pizza pricing. I mean, absolutely everything is going up in price right now, isn’t it? Massive fuel cost increases over the past half decade seem to have made everything more expensive. So how big a deal can a little bump in wheat prices be?
Spring wheat for March delivery fell $1.75 Thursday to close at $18.25 a bushel on the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. It traded as high as $25 a bushel this week. Wheat historically trades at $3 to $7 a bushel.
Holy Lolita-smacking beat-down. That’s a lotta price jumping, isn’t it? So, how to cope? Continue reading “Pizza pricing”