I was waiting in line in Panera Bread (fast food bakery chain) this morning getting ready to order my green tea and the woman in front of me ordered what I guess was her normal order. When the cashier was done adding everything up the total was $15 something and the customer was surprised. She explained that her order was normally $13 something and inquired about the price difference. The cashier pointed to a sign on the counter and said, “sorry nothing I can do about it.”
The sign basically said that “wheat, dairy and transportation costs continue to escalate (wheat alone is now 100% higher than six months ago)…” 100% higher in just the last 6 MONTHS? I am afraid that this sign is going to become more prevalent across all restaurants and grocery stores in the not to distant future. Transportation fuels are only going to continue to rise and now that we are headed into the summer months more there won’t even be a short term break from the escalating costs.
The rise in wheat can be attributed to a couple of factors. One is that our fertile land is shrinking in size do to the chemical pesticides that have become common practice, fuel is getting more expensive to run the tractors, but most notably, other crops are now competing for that land. As oil continues to climb, farmers are getting more aggressive about which crops they should be growing and right now, ethanol is getting a lot of attention because of its potential use as a transportation fuel. So that means that fewer farmers are going to grow wheat and wheat is going to get more expensive.
As a business, how can we plan for such changes in commodity prices? Well, first of all, you had better be doing what ever you can to lower your environmental footprint. The more you consume to run your business, increasingly the more expensive business will be to run. Also, think about how you can change your business into service based business, then a low impact service based business. One example of a service based business is the possibility of light bulbs as a service. Just about every business I walk into is still using expensive and wasteful incandescent light bulbs. So, why not start a company that goes into one of the 10,000's of small businesses here in Chicago as an example and says, "for a fee, I will change out all of your light bulbs and for $15 a month, I will replace them free of charge as long as you pay the monthly fee."
The End of Cheap Food - To learn more about this author, visit C Temp's Website.
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C Temp
(Visit C's Website)
Student of entrepreneurship, leadership
and the environment.
I have been an entrepreneur for a number
of years now, my biggest success being the
founder of OpenTable, Inc.
(OpenTable.com). Since OpenTable I have
been focused on early stage company
development, with an emphasis on being
green. My most recent venture the Green
Business Project – Simplifying the
Greening Processing for Businesses at www.g
reenbusinessproject.com is an early
stage attempt to centralize the knowledge
of the business community into a tool that
will be beneficial to all businesses that
are trying to move in a greener direction.
It is currently focused on Restaurants
with other verticals to follow (such as
banking, retail, grocery,…). Because any
business is so far from being sustainable,
I didn’t feel it right to make a
certification program. This is a “relative
score” rating system in which businesses
will be able to see how they stack up
against each other, hopefully creating a
competitive environment between them to
accelerate progress.
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