Holiday feast to gobble up savings

‘A perfect storm’ for higher prices

Thanksgiving 2021 is shaping up to be the most expensive meal in the history of the holiday.

Caroline Hoffman is already stashing canned pumpkin in the kitchen of her Chicago apartment when she finds some for under a dollar. She recently spent almost $2 more for the vanilla she’ll need to bake pumpkin bread and other desserts for the various Thanksgiving celebrations she’s been invited to.

Matthew McClure paid 20% more this month than he did last year for the 25 pasture-raised turkeys he plans to roast at the Hive, the Bentonville restaurant where he is the executive chef. And Norman Brown, director of sweet-potato sales for Wada Farms in Raleigh, N.C., is paying truckers nearly twice as much as usual to haul the crop to other parts of the country.

“I never seen anything like it, and I’ve been running sweet potatoes for 38 or 39 years,” Brown said. “I don’t know what the answer is, but in the end it’s all going to get passed on to the consumer.”

Nearly every component of the traditional American Thanksgiving dinner, from the disposable aluminum turkey roasting pan to the coffee and pie, will cost more this year, according to agricultural economists, farmers

and grocery executives. Major food companies like Nestle and Procter & Gamble have already warned consumers to brace for more price increases.

There is no single culprit. The nation’s food supply has been battered by a knotted supply chain, high transportation expenses, labor shortages, trade policies and bad weather. Inflation is at play, too. In September, the Consumer Price Index for food was up 4.6% from a year ago. Prices for meat, poultry, fish and eggs jumped drastically, by 10.5%.

Weeks before the holiday feast, home cooks have started shopping, hoping to get ahead of shortages and price creep. “I picture a perfect storm of increased demand and lack of supply,” said Matt Lardie, a food writer in Durham, N.C., who has already laid out his Thanksgiving game plan and expects to have some components in the freezer by next week.

For many cooks, the biggest expense will be the turkey. By the end of the year, market analysts say, prices per pound are likely to surpass the record Department of Agriculture benchmark price for turkeys — $1.36, set in 2015.

Turkey is more expensive largely because the price of corn, which most commercial turkeys feed on, more than doubled in some parts of the country from July 2020 to July 2021. Whole frozen birds between 8 and 16 pounds already cost 25 cents a pound more than they did a year ago, according to the weekly Department of Agriculture turkey report released Friday.

The price rises are hitting in a year when covid vaccines and loosened health guidelines point to bigger holiday celebrations than in 2020. There will be fewer turkeys on the market, but demand is expected to be higher, particularly for smaller birds and for more carefully raised and processed turkeys.

PREMIUM BIRDS

Kroger executives are anticipating more of what marketers call the “premiumization” of Thanksgiving ingredients, with many cooks shopping for turkeys that are fresh, organic, free-range or processed in ways that elevate them beyond an inexpensive frozen bird.

“Customers aren’t necessarily going out to restaurants, so they are upping their game in terms of products,” said Stuart Aitken, the company’s chief merchant.

Still, plenty of households will be looking for bargain turkeys and trying to stretch their food budget.

“I can buy that this will be the most expensive Thanksgiving ever, but there’s an incomeinequality story here that matters a lot,” said Trey Malone, an agricultural economist at Michigan State University. “The rich are going to be spending more on Thanksgiving than they have ever spent before, but not everyone is going to be able to do that.”

Packaged dinner rolls will be pricier because the cost of almost all the ingredients commercial bakers use has gone up. Canned cranberry sauce will cost more because domestic steel plants have yet to catch up after pandemic shutdowns, and China is limiting steel production to reduce carbon emissions. As a result, steel prices have remained more than 200% higher than they were before the pandemic.

“All of these dynamics are not theoretical,” said Katheryn Russ, an economics professor at the University of California at Davis. “We can’t lose sight of how these broader issues hit home.”

WEATHER HURT CROPS

Extreme weather has made Thanksgiving ingredients cost more, too.

A late-spring drought in the Midwest damaged the sugar beet crop, which had already been hurt by freezing weather in 2019. Hurricane Ida shut cane-sugar refineries in the South. Grape, nut and citrus crops in California have suffered under this year’s drought. Brazil, which supplies the world with more coffee than any other country, has endured severe drought and then a surprise July frost, resulting in less coffee and higher prices.

Although grocery-store executives predict spot shortages on some items, economists like Russ say there is no indication that the panic-buying that was a hallmark of pandemic shopping in 2020 will resurface.

That’s not reassuring to some home cooks, who are worried about not being able to find smaller turkeys, canned pumpkin or the particular kind of stuffing mix they like.

Hoffman, a Chicago resident who works in public relations and blogs about food, recently had a difficult time finding cream of tartar and mini marshmallows.

“I dread buying vanilla,” she said.