Retail potatoes are 20.7 per cent more expensive than just 12 months ago. According to Statistics Canada, a 10-pound bag of potatoes in Canada retails for an average of $9.77, up from $8.11 a year ago. Frozen fried potatoes have gone up 17.1 per cent as well, retailing now at $3.02 for one kg.
The next thing we asked ourselves was what is the most expensive potato in the world?
Most Expensive Potato in the World is French! If someone asked you to name the most expensive foods in the world, you might come up with caviar and truffles and that sort of thing.
When I was researching we ran into the question “Are French potatoes worth $300 a pound?”.
One way to consider this is and yet there is a type of French potato that is so rare and delicious that it sometimes fetches a whopping $300 a pound—as much as Kobe beef! La Bonnotte potatoes are grown on Noirmoutier Island, a little speck in the ocean near the city of La Rochelle in Charente-Maritime.
How high have potato prices gone up?
Potato prices in the period since mid-June have been 46% higher than in the same period last year, says Dr André Jooste, CEO of industry association Potatoes SA. The recent price surge has surpassed the previous highs seen at the beginning of 2016, at the height of the drought.
One source claimed that this is due to an unusually cold winter in Limpopo, which has hurt the early part of the harvest. South Africa has seen a massive surge in potato prices in recent months, after an unusually cold winter in Limpopo hurt the early part of the province’s harvest.
Why is there a potato shortage?
Cold weather has led to a potato shortage in North America, threatening the availability of french fries, Bloomberg reported Monday. Potato crop yields dropped in areas like Alberta and Manitoba in Canada and Colorado, Idaho, North Dakota, and Minnesota in the US because of cold-weather snaps from September to November.
Will there be a potato shortage next year?
We’d have mass shortage of potatoes, and that would have been even worse. Narrator: Luckily, Zak says all this food waste won’t lead to a shortage next year. Farmers are still planting potatoes, just not as much.
Why is there a shortage of potato chips in SA?
Days later, South Africa’s leading makers of potato chips warned that potatoes were in disturbingly short supply after a bad frost and excessive rains led to low local yields, on top of global sourcing shortages .
How many potatoes are stuck in the supply chain?
For a small operation, for us. Narrator: All in all, an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of potatoes are trapped in the supply chain across the US. Zak: If I was advising a year ago, not knowing what was gonna happen, I wouldn’t have told them to do anything differently than they did now.
Is there a shortage of french fries?
An official from the restaurant industry predicted that the shortage of french fries will continue for the time being , although the timing will vary slightly depending on which company supplies the french fries. ‘Potato shortage’ brought about by the spread of vaccines?