Liam Dann: NZ Herald business editor at large on chocolate and olive oil pushing up food price inflation for August

Chocolate, olive oil, butter and takeaway meals have been blamed for pushing up food price inflation in August, according to new reports.

Fresh fruit and vegetable prices kept falling, down 12 percent. Falling kūmara, potatoes, and lettuce prices led the way. Potatoes are now the cheapest they’ve been in three years.

NZ Herald business editor at large explains the factors driving this data.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chocolate, olive oil, butter, and takeaways the ones that pushed
up food price inflation in August. Overall food prices increased
zero point four percent in the year to August thirty one.
That's not bad a but look at this. Okay, let
this be the lesson to you that you should be
eating the fruit and vegies and not the chocolate, because
those prices were down twelve percent. Liam dan Is The
Herald's Business editor at large.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Alam get either.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Why is chocolate up twenty percent on last year? That's
a lot.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Yeah, chocolate and olive oil both hit at the at
the actual growing end. You know, Africa for chocolate and
Southern Mediterranean area for olive oil. Both have had terribly
disruptive growing seasons and that's pushed the whole wholesale price up.
And well, you know, olive oil and particularly is sort
of like double what it used to be. So yeah,
that's a shame. But hey, it's never been a better

(00:45):
time to get a cage of potatoes, according to statsin
z Ed. So there you go. I just cook it
and some other oil fry them, and some fry your
chips and something else.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
Yeah, what about butter, No, that's expensive as well.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Yeah that was another one.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
Yeah, okay, so no potatoes and butter, so boil them.
What what else apart from potatoes has come down in price.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
Well, the good news really when you when you sort
of get below the sort of headline items that we
like to put in headlines is that, you know, petrol,
transport costs, even even rental starting to ease or stabilize.
So there was enough there that the economists are looking
at that and going okay, that's that's pretty good. That
that's disinflation still, it's the sort of last vestige is

(01:26):
inflation coming out, and and and they're confident now that
we'll see annual consumer price and X inflation fall below
two point fall to about two point five something like that,
so below three, which is where the Reserve Bank has
to have it, and the sort of bet the house
on it really by cutting rates already. So and this
is the last lot of you know, partial inflation data

(01:48):
we get before that, and of course we get another
Reserve Bank call before we see the full consumer price
and X inflation, so odds will get another cut before then.
So they'd be looking pretty silly if it didn't didn't
come down, but it is looking pretty good from here.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
GDP data is out this week, or do you want
to take a punt on what we're going to see.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
Yeah, well it's going to be an economic contraction of
some sort. I mean, the reserve band could said zero
point five. I've seen economists picking from zero point one,
zero point four something like that. So that's we bounced
out of recession in the March quarter. So contracting again
means we're not quite in another recession. But I've seen
it described, i think by Michael Gordon at WESTPEC as

(02:30):
a rolling mall of recession. It's really just bouncing around
in and out of recession. So yeah, nothing good in
that second quarter, but it is a bit historic, and
it might be the worst quarter before the interest rates
start to look a bit better and we all stay
up to feel a bit happier.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
Liam, Thank you very much, really appreciate it, mate, Liam Dan,
the Herald's Business editor at large.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
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