Ask HN: Why is cereal so expensive now? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is cereal so expensive now?

7 pointslando231911 comments

My wife tells me box breakfast cereal has doubled in price, I don't know if this is true, is it? And also if cereal is so much more expensive recently why is that, is there something special about cereal?

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Are you talking about real cereal like bulk oatmeal, bulk cream of wheat, etc? Or boxed branded cereal? The latter is going to be a terrible value like any processed food, and is always going to be subjected to shrinkflation. Worse because they know families with children buy it mindlessly or because their kids demand it.

Thanks I updated it to say box breakfast cereal

The cost of grain in a cereal box is trivial relative to the price. The bulk of the cost of cereal is in advertising, labor and logistics.

Logistics are the most likely culprit but my guess is the price has doubled because people are still buying it and they can.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/31760/does-the-...

Ukraine exports quite a bit of wheat and corn. They probably won't be able to grow enough to export this year because it's a warzone. Egypt, a country of 100 million people, gets most of its wheat from Ukraine and Russia, and Russia isn't exporting any, either.[0]

First, GPUs went up in price, then gas, next is grains. Stock up while you can.

[0] https://theconversation.com/in-egypt-where-a-meal-isnt-compl...

Also, the Chinese wheat crop isn't looking good due to excess rain last Winter, and the Oregon/Washington crop is failing due to drought in the Western US. Grains can be substituted for each other to a certain degree, so it's not unexpected that breakfast cereal would be more expensive.

Not so fun fact: it's impossible to get frogspawn this year for embryology lecture. Frogspawn tends to come from California, but spawning season didn't happen due to the severe Western drought. We haven't seen the beginning of the Sixth extinction yet.

The amount of wheat actually traded is quite small (few percent of the global crop), with UKR’s and RUS’s adding up to only a million tons or so. I think this year’s total production is estimated to be 3-4 Mt larger than last year’s.

There’s still the case that Ukraine itself needs to be fed but I think the overall demand will be straightforward to meet.

https://fortune.com/2022/03/24/russia-ukraine-wheat-exports-...

Depends on the timeframe, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index the price of Cereals and Bakery products have increased 7.8% in the last 12 months. The entire Food category was up 7.9% during the same time - https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-pri...

Bidenomics

President Putin and former President Trump, have conspired together in a conspiratorial conspiracy to force President Biden to enact sanctions on Russia that are for TBD 'reasons' destroying the petro/dollar and increasing the cost of diesel. Also inflation may not be transitory.

A rather humorous conspiracy theory. Trump has been blamed for more things than the mythical boogie man. Western countries such as the US have been curtailing supply, eg oil, while at the same time trafficking in loose money. Coupled with demand coming out of COVID lockdowns, paying people to stay home (at least in the States) has led to an intentional mess. Not to mention employment disruptions caused by vaccine mandates, and other COVID measures which fell disproportionately on non-professionals, eg a lot of white collar folks worked from home and were less affected, the economy is in a mess. While my comment, Bidenomics, was heavily voted down, if you had lived through as many Presidents as I have and seen these scenarios play out more than once, you’d be more aware of the policy implications.

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