Restaurant loses on $11 cauliflower

Restaurateur Charn Tiebtienriat is feeling the pinch. He runs Suk Jai Thai in Whangarei and said the price of vegetables was making it hard to turn a profit.

While shopping this week he found courgettes at $13.49 a kilogram, cauliflower at $10.99 a head and celery for $5.29 a bunch.

He said that made it a lot harder to turn a profit on the meals his restaurant serves – which are set at prices that cannot change according to the fluctuating cost of ingredients.

‘‘Sometimes the price change is temporary because there’s a shortage and the price goes back to the same but other times the price goes up and doesn’t go back down again.’’

Tiebtienrat said when his family opened their restaurant 20 years ago, a carton of cashew nuts was $100. Now it is $500. ‘‘The price of the meal has hardly changed.’’

Vegetables had been noticeably more expensive over the past two months, he said. ‘‘Cauliflower has gone up in price so much that we have to put less in.’’

Data from Statistics New Zealand shows cauliflower was $2.75/kg in February 2007. This February it was $4.51. Broccoli was also more expensive, from $4.19 in February 2007 to $6.98 now. Lettuce moved from $2.30 to $4.51.

Ajay Jina, managing director of Jina’s World of Fresh Produce, said supply had dropped because of diminished crops. Things would improve again when the weather cooled, he said.

A spokesperson for Countdown said: ‘‘Throughout February we’ve had very wet and humid weather … We work really closely with a range of growers right around the country to manage this as best we can. We also look to import from Australia, if there is extremely low supply from around New Zealand.’’