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The Real Story Behind Rising Food Prices
Your grocery bill didn’t just get more expensive — it got more expensive for completely different reasons depending on what’s in your cart. In this episode, we trace a decade of plant food price increases through five distinct waves: the biofuel-driven global food crises of 2007 and 2012, the COVID supply chain collapse, the worst food inflation since 1979, a corporate pricing debate that reached Congress, and now a tariff era that is hitting the produce aisle harder than any other part of the store.
We go deep on five specific foods — organic dried apricots, rolled oats, brown basmati rice from Lundberg Family Farms, peanut butter, and Medjool dates — each with a completely different price story. Droughts in California’s Sacramento Valley. A catastrophic frost in Turkey that wiped out 98% of the apricot harvest. A date industry that got famous on TikTok and couldn’t grow trees fast enough to keep up. And the question nobody has fully answered yet: once prices rise, does anyone in the food industry actually have an incentive to bring them back down?