Ian Wright, chief executive of the Food and Drink Federation (FDF) told the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee that rising costs across the food supply chain were "concerning."
Wright told the room that the committee now needs “to think seriously about inflation.” He continued: “In hospitality, a precursor to retail, inflation is running somewhere between 14 and 18%. That is terrifying.
“A significant amount of inflation is already coming into the [supply chain] system. Commodity prices are going up. Gas prices […] are the highest they’ve ever been. Wage inflation is very significant across the supply chain, because of the shortage of workers.”
Closing his opening statement to the committee, Wright said that inflation is “a bigger scourge than anything else because it discriminates against the poor.”
When asked by Alan Brown MP about the effect of the rises in wages in the HGV sector on inflation across the wider supply chain, Wright explained while it is good news for employees gaining rises in pay, it has a knock-on effect on the rest of the supply chain.
This story was originally published on a previous version of the Meat Management website and so there may be some missing images and formatting issues.
