Full Court Press’ restaurants work to maintain 25% lower market prices than other area restaurants, but with the higher price of meat, Bruning said, they are grappling with absorbing the cost until the market levels out. It is unclear when that will be. Suppliers for both Bruning and Warth estimate it at anywhere from six months to two years.
Substituting boneless wings for bone-in wings is one of the ways Full Court Press restaurants could eliminate the need to charge customers more or drastically alter menus, Bruning said.
While meat costs are on the rise, Bruning said his restaurants also have experienced the effects of an overall labor shortage. And they’re feeling a myriad of other pinches, including a scant availability of plastic Heinz ketchup bottles and aluminum cans, which affect the supply of beer.
According to Lee Schulz, an ISU agricultural economist, a variety of factors at work in the overall economy are pushing the rise in meat prices.
Cost-push inflation, or the increase in prices due to increased costs of wages and raw materials, is partially to blame, Schulz said. He points to the price of cattle and hog feed, building materials for farm structures, such as lumber and concrete, and to rising wages in the livestock industry as it struggles to find workers.
Additionally, Shulz said, demand-pull inflation is at play as well, though he noted that there isn’t exactly a shortage of meat. Supplies and labor are in high demand, but packing plants are back to typical, pre-pandemic processing levels, he said.
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Originally Appeared Here