KFC Australia saw its profits increase by 12.9% last year but are refusing to pay an increased price for lettuce amid crop shortages.
KFC Australia has just announced that it will be replacing lettuce with a cabbage lettuce mix until further notice. Cabbage is significantly cheaper than its lettuce counterpart in Australia and for the majority of 2022, lettuce was over three times more expensive. Now, it’s even more so.
The soaring prices of lettuce in Australia can primarily be attributed to severe flooding in NSW and QLD which is a typical byproduct of increasingly erratic weather patterns due to climate change. KFC then used these factors as a justification for avoiding the increased price of lettuce and instead passed the buck onto the consumer, keeping costs low and lowering the quality of their product as a result.
All of this has happened despite KFC Australia’s parent company, Collins Food Ltd, reporting same-store sales growth of 12.9 percent in the last year. This has been a common trend among large corporations throughout the pandemic. Many of these corporations have used inflation as a scapegoat to mitigate consumer frustrations despite reporting record profits at the same time.
On its website, KFC Australia said: “Due to the recent floods in NSW [New South Wales] and QLD [Queensland] we’re currently experiencing a lettuce shortage. So, we’re using a lettuce and cabbage blend on all products containing lettuce until further notice.”
However, what readers need to be aware of is that “a lettuce shortage” does not mean KFC has no access to lettuce, it means that the price of lettuce has gone up and KFC isn’t willing to pay the increase. Instead, they would rather pass on any losses to the people eating their food, people who are also being affected by the flooding in those same areas.
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