Food. We need it. A comment my better half made after reading an article about food pricing made me think about where food comes from and etc. So I did some research on food pricing. The numbers I found are aligned with those from the article. You can read further about the number in this Food Marketing Institution (www.fmi.org) report on food marketing.
Basicaly, when you pay a dollar for food only 19¢ pays for all the effort needed to grow and produce that food. The remainder (81¢) pays for marketing fees which includes transportation (4¢), packaging(8¢), retailer share(4.5¢) and the biggest portion going to the labor of all that marketing (from truck driver to store clerks) at 38.7¢
Of the retailer's 4.5¢ share, only 1.9¢ is profit. The rest pays for its operations and its own marketing.
And there's an "other" 22.4¢ which I did not find much explications about but the sure fact is that it's a quarter of your money going somewhere else than paying for the actual food or paying for jobs created by this whole marketing process.
Next time you go to the superstore, divide your total bill by 5 and that's the cost to produce the actual food you bought.
That being said, where ever you are, support the local merchants as much as you can.
Here's a few more interesting links from fmi.org :
Competition and Profit
Supermarket Facts
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