In the midst of witnessing increases of up to 100% in the cost of inputs, such as chicken, turkey, salmon, tomato and many other foods, the restaurant industry assured that will not transfer the inflationary impact diners much less lower the quality of the dishes, after achieve 97% economic recovery at pre-pandemic levels.
Daniela Mijares, Executive President of the National Chamber of the Restaurant and Spicy Food Industry (Canirac)said that businesses are willing to see their profit margins squeezed before the direct cost of inflation is passed on to diners.
When participating in the Mother’s Day 2022 panel, the role of economic reactivation, the representative of the restaurants specified that the sector registered sales of 1,750 million pesos on May 10, which represents 97% of those obtained during the 2019, when 1,800 million pesos were achieved.
“We are seeing that diners are having the confidence to return (to restaurants), we cannot punish the diners… from our trench we are doing that, very observant and very creative, to see how we can restructure the menus so as not to hit the quality”, said Mijares.
Regarding the government measure to eliminate tariffs for some foods, the president of Canirac commented that the effect will be null, because most of the raw materials consumed by restaurants are part of trade agreements, such as the T-MEC, which are free of tariffs. While 85% of the inputs used by the industry are of national origin.
For his part, the national president of the Mexican Flower Council, Federico Martínez, said that one of the strategies to curb inflation is that employees will work 14 hours a day, after freight rates have risen to 100% and production costs, especially imported ones, continue to rise.
For this year, the plant and flower industry expects an economic benefit of 3,000 million pesos.
