Wheat crop strong; bread sales fall
America’s wheat crop is making a comeback. Too bad U.S. grocery shoppers want to buy less food made with it.
Although crop conditions for the staple grain are the best in four years, purchases of many flour-based foods have been slipping. The U.S. Department of Agriculture expects the amount of wheat used in food this year to hit the lowest level in five years. In the fourth quarter, millers churned out the least flour for that time of year in data going back a decade, signaling demand for the baking staple isn’t quite holding up.
The pullback has been especially acute in sweets and processed foods. Cookie and cracker unit sales were down 3.4% from the previous year as of late February, data from consumer intelligence company NIQ show. Grocery-aisle bread sales fell 2%.
Several overlapping factors are behind the slumping demand. The increased adoption of weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic is beginning to impede appetite for some foods, with grocery spending in households that use them falling as much as 9%, Morgan Stanley said in a report earlier this year. Inflation is also partly to blame, with high prices still slamming shoppers. Cash-strapped households are also trying to waste less food as prices continue to climb.
“Indulgences that people were spending money on during the pandemic — that’s been scaled back,” said Brian Walker, a milling industry consultant.
As domestic demand slips, American wheat farmers will increasingly need to look abroad to find buyers. It’s not going to be easy: U.S. farmers were already losing ground in global export markets amid an influx of cheaper supplies offered by top shipper Russia. That means U.S. prices will need to come down in order to compete — a blow to wheat farmers who’ve just come out of a challenging growing period.
Last spring, fields were so plagued by drought that farmers abandoned crops at the highest rate in more than a century. Some U.S. flour mills hunting for supplies during that time were forced to turn to rare imports, including from Poland and France, to help make up for the domestic shortfall. This year, though, 56% of the winter wheat crop is deemed by the USDA to be good or excellent, double the rate a year ago.
There are some pockets of flour-based food demand that have held strong. Consumers have been trending away from super-processed foods with a long shelf life and toward smaller batch items. Bakery bread sales, for instance, were up 3.5% in the past year, NIQ data show. Dave’s Killer Bread, a packaged organic product, saw unit volumes soar 10% even as overall bread sales were down, owner Flower Foods Inc. said on its fourthquarter call in February.