It’s a bad time to pig out on a capicola sub or sausage pizza.
The prices businesses receive for sausage, deli meat and boxed meats rose a seasonally adjusted 4.9% in March, the fastest pace in nearly 34 years, the Labor Department said Friday. The jump reflects surging prices for a key ingredient: pork.
The producer price index for pork is up 16.5% from a year ago. A category that includes beef and veal is 9.3% higher. (The overall price index rose 1.4% in March from a year earlier, the largest annual increase since last August.)
Bloomberg News
A. Litteri, an Italian grocery and deli in Washington, just last week raised the price of its Italian sausage — all made in-house — by a dollar to $4.99 a pound, said owner Michael DeFrancisci. That was the first price increase in roughly a decade.
The price of Boston butt, which the store uses to make its hot and mild sausages, has climbed about a dollar a pound in the last three weeks, Mr. DeFrancisci said.
“We don’t know when it’s going to come back down again,” Mr. DeFrancisci said. “Not in the foreseeable future. We’ll leave [the price of sausage] like it is for quite some time.”
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which uses different metrics, hog prices surged in the second half of February and landed about 13% higher than a year earlier.
USDA analysts say prices are rising in anticipation of shortages. The porcine epidemic diarrhea virus was first confirmed in the U.S. last May at an Iowa farm. The disease has since spread to 28 states and killed millions of young pigs, rapidly increasing costs for major hog-farm operators and threatening to curb U.S. pork supplies.
“There is a lot of uncertainty in the market,” said USDA agricultural economist Mildred Haley. “No one has a perfect count on the deaths, on infections. That’s a big part of the problem.”
Demand may also be a factor. While pork prices are rising, beef prices are rising even faster after cattle herds were thinned by drought.
“High beef prices are inducing most consumers to alter their animal-product consumption patterns: less beef, more pork (at higher prices), and more poultry (at flat-to-lower prices),” the USDA said in a monthly report.
