Although some companies have reported that cost inflation on ingredients has begun to ease, specialty food makers polled by SFA News Daily said they have not seen their input costs decline. In fact, transportation costs have increased significantly and remain well above pre-pandemic levels. Some makers said they have maintained steady pricing for their customers even as their own costs have increased, and others said they planned to reduce their prices if their input costs come down. SFA News Daily asked representatives from Crackerology, a maker of appetizer kits; Nutcase Vegan, a maker of plant-based meat alternatives, and RIND, a maker of plant-based cheeses, the following question:
Q: Are you seeing your ingredients costs going down, and if so, will that impact your retail pricing?
Janine Akers, chief crackerologist, Crackerology
As a relatively small business startup, unfortunately, we are not seeing significant cost improvements yet. Fortunately, we have more purchasing confidence in product availability. We’re also seeing shipping prices stabilize. We know supply chain issues are improving and certain raw ingredient costs are stabilizing; however, it’s larger organizations with larger buying power that may be able to leverage better costs at this time with their purchasing power. I’m not sure when the small business will begin to benefit from improved costs.
At Crackerology, we’re strong proponents of providing our customers with a superior product and superior service at a fair market value. So once we do see benefit from lower costs, we will absolutely pass that on to our customers.
Monica Randles, co-founder, Nutcase Vegan
We have not seen a decrease in our ingredient costs yet, but we didn’t increase our prices all through COVID. We use all organic, kosher ingredients. We are a whole food, plant-based product—walnuts, hazelnuts, brown rice, quinoa—we haven’t seen those ingredient costs go down at this point. We haven’t bought any spices recently, so maybe those have gone down. Hopefully, transportation costs will go down.
We’re a small business, and we don’t have a huge staff anyway, but we definitely didn’t bring on anyone else during that time. So that’s one way we minimized costs, by not hiring more people and outsourcing some things.
Dina DiCenso, founder, RIND
We actually never even raised our prices when inflation started occurring, because we had contracts that locked in our costs.
Where we are seeing things get out of control are in transportation costs. I don’t see transportation coming down at all. When we have to move pallets, the cost of LTL [less than truckload] refrigerated is really out of control. I am seeing that now because we have had to get pallets of our sliced cheeses to different places around the country, and they definitely cost a lot more than when we were moving things around a few months ago. Things that were $750 just six months ago are now $1,200. It’s outrageous. It’s price gouging. It’s not like gas has been going up. That’s been stable and declining.
Related: Maker Q&A: Industry Irritations; Americans Feeling Inflation's Impact.