Hyderabad, August 03: Food prices have shot through the roof in recent months, scalding people in their wake. The retail buyer (households) as well as the wholesale purchaser (Hotels and restaurants) are having to suffer because the prices of vegetables, pulses, rice, tea, coffee and sugar have increased, in some cases doubled in the last four months.
If households are unable to balance their budgets, hotels are seeing their margins disappearing because they are reluctant to pass on the burden entirely to the consumer.
Households are now cutting down on pulses because they just cannot afford them. Sangeeta Rani, a working professional from Ameerpet doesn’t buy pulses as often as she used to. “Pulses have become so expensive that I buy them just once or twice a month,” she said. Her family now does not complain when tur dal (kandi pappu) or idlis and dosas are not in the menu that often.
Tur now costs Rs 105 per kg up from Rs 45 while urad hovers at Rs 80, up from Rs 42.
Sugar has shot up by Rs 8 while even the price of rice has increased by Rs 10. What is worse is that prices are expected to rise further, making budgeting all but impossible.
Hotels and restaurants in the Twin Cities are caught in a bind because increasing raw material prices are eating into their margins.
The ongoing economic slowdown has added to their woes because rooms are going unfilled.
It’s a perfect recipe for disaster.
The price of milk, sugar, coffee, vegetables, pulses, rice, which form the bulk raw materials used by hotels, have increased two-fold in the last four months, prompting menu revisions. But fearful of the effect on demand, hoteliers are raising price only nominally.
A well-known hotel in Secunderabad has revised its menu twice in the last six months. Each time it increased the price of all items by only one rupee.
“We are absorbing the losses rather than passing them onto the customers,” claims Jagdish Rao, secretary of the Andhra Pradesh Hotels Association. Take a cup of coffee served in most Udipi hotels. The price of the three ingredients has risen as follows: Coffee powder now costs Rs 80 per kg, milk is up by Rs 3 a litre and sugar by Rs 8 per kg.
And yet the price of a cup of coffee has risen by only a few rupees.
“Food prices are defying gravity,” says Hari Rao, owner of Taj Mahal Hotel. “Our customers keep asking us why food is so expensive if inflation is supposedly low,” he added. Even the ingredients used in condiments are getting expensive. The prices of elaichi, cashew, khas khas and saffron have increased by one and a half times in the last four-six months. On top of that labour costs have risen too. Rising food prices has become a political issue with Opposition parties raking it up in the run-up to the GHMC polls.
Ruling and Opposition party members have been visiting supermarkets to ‘demonstrate’ that they share the common man’s pain.
However, the common man remains sceptical.
“They will come for a few minutes with television cameras and go, it is us who suffer,” adds Sangeeta Rani.
–Agencies–