A customer uses a shopping cart bearing the logo of Aeon Co. at its supermarket in Tokyo, Japan. - Photo: Reuters file
TOKYO: The number of food and beverage products whose prices have been or will be raised this year is expected to top 10,000 items, down markedly from last year, when the number exceeded 30,000 items, a private research firm has found.
As the yen grows weaker on the exchange market, there are concerns that the costs of buying raw materials and ingredients from abroad will soar, and Teikoku Databank, Ltd. believes that “there will be a rush of large-scale price hikes from now through the autumn.”
The research firm collected price trends from 195 major domestic food and beverage manufacturers.
The number of items whose prices went up or are slated to go up during the January-November period totalled 10,086.
This number is less than one-third of the number of items whose prices went up in the whole of 2023, which totaled 32,396.
Yet, as to the major causes of price hikes, “rises in raw material prices” accounted for more than 90%, the same as last year, while “the weak yen” accounted for 29.8%, up from 11.4% in 2023.
In July, a total of 411 food and beverage items are scheduled to go up in price.
Mercian Corp. plans to raise the prices of about 130 wine products, with prices of imported wines up by a range of 5% to 50% and Japanese wines by 10%.
Yamazaki Baking Co. will raise the prices of some of its products using raisins and chocolate.
Besides the weak yen, these companies have been affected by higher costs of raw materials, due to poor crops caused by unfavourable weather. - The Japan News/ANN
