Head of the Czech Food Chamber: Czechs Have No Idea What Food Really Costs

The head of the Czech Food and Consumer Goods Chamber has spoken about the challenges facing the country's food industry and why the public has such a distorted picture of what food actually costs to produce.

According to her, the sector has been living through constant instability in recent years: first the COVID-19 pandemic, then the energy crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine, and now the conflict in the Middle East on top of everything else. Add to that the European Commission's requirements — new regulations that may look like mere paperwork at first glance but end up translating into real costs for producers.

Why food prices are misleading

The chamber's head noted that food prices are constantly in the headlines — for instance, in discussions about their contribution to falling overall inflation. But in her view, this creates a false impression: the public simply doesn't grasp how much it actually costs to produce food.

Meanwhile, the industry operates by its own economic logic: beyond energy and raw material costs, producers are facing a noticeable rise in logistics and administrative expenses. She singled out packaging in particular — its cost has jumped sharply since the pandemic, even though this issue rarely gets mentioned. On top of that, the minimum wage keeps rising — a fair development for workers' incomes, but one that producers still have to absorb.

"Nobody's saying people shouldn't be paid fairly, but food producers need to actually make money on it," she stressed. According to her, pushing simultaneously for lower food prices and higher costs simply doesn't add up. She described it as a positive sign that recent discussions increasingly frame food as a strategic resource — one that the Czech Republic should be processing more of domestically rather than exporting raw.

Why Czechs export raw materials abroad

Asked how the country could achieve deeper processing of its produce domestically, the chamber's head said this is a long-standing and painful issue. The Czech Republic exports raw materials largely because of price: buyers abroad are willing to pay more for Czech beef, since it's viewed there as a premium product.

At the same time, she explained, domestic processors would in principle be willing to pay farmers a fair price, but they can only afford to pay as much as they'll later be able to recoup by selling the finished product to retail chains. This forces them to lower the price they pay farmers for raw materials, and farmers, whenever they have the option, prefer to sell abroad, where they get more.

According to the chamber's head, the only way to solve this problem is to fix these distortions in the supply chain and create conditions for more efficient processing of food products within the country.

Source: novinky.cz