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Latihan shadowing: Why Groceries Are SO Expensive Now

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  1. Aids, milk, bread, ground beef, butter.0:01
  2. Prices at the grocery store are going up, especially for people who spend a large amount of their income on food.0:04
  3. So a little price shock can have huge effects.0:10
  4. Grocery prices that usually go up one or 2 % a year have started jumping to more like 13 % a year.0:12
  5. Prices are going up yet again.0:19
  6. Sticker shock on store shelves.0:20
  7. You probably don't need to be reminded.0:22
  8. Now, of course, everyone's blaming COVID and broader inflation.0:24
  9. And while those are a part of the explanation, there's actually something bigger going on here.0:27
  10. I mean, check this out.0:32
  11. Food companies are bringing in record profits.0:33
  12. CEOs of those companies are making way more just in the last few years.0:35
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  1. And shareholders are getting huge payouts.0:38
  2. So what is going on here?0:40
  3. That is a question I have had for a long time and we're sitting here in the kitchen, which is also our studio.0:42
  4. And I thought, you know, gotta use it sometime.0:48
  5. So why not on the video about food?0:51
  6. Today we're gonna understand our food system, the vast complicated kind of magical food system that provides a lot of us with our nourishment, bringing food from all around the0:53
  7. world to our grocery store shelves.1:01
  8. And then we're gonna look at the corporations behind this system.1:03
  9. I wanna understand what their incentives are, what their power is, and what they have to do, if anything, with the rising prices.1:06
  10. I also wanna understand why they're making so much money right now.1:12
  11. And ultimately, I want to answer what and who is behind this massive increase in grocery store prices.1:14
  12. About 8 ,000 years ago, in what today is Syria and Iraq, you could find humans doing something that was pretty unique for the time.1:22
  13. They're growing food, and in fact, more food than they actually needed, and then started trading it with other people who had more than they needed.1:30
  14. Now, this was new.1:38
  15. If there was one group who lived near a salt mine and another group who grew wheat, it would both make a surplus, it would swap their goods, and both1:39
  16. would be better off.1:45
  17. A super basic idea that changed everything.1:46
  18. Humans started doing this at a more and more massive scale.1:49
  19. Crossing seas and deserts, building empires to move goods, to share tools to spread ideas, and the collective human focus became how do we do this better, bigger?1:52
  20. We invented technology to improve it.2:02
  21. We fought wars over it.2:04
  22. We created money and companies and laws, entire systems, just to trade more stuff with more people.2:05
  23. Trade was changing the world, and a lot of the history of our world is the history of trade.2:11
  24. It's what spread ideas and technology and flavors around the globe.2:16
  25. Arabic math and Chinese inventions, tomatoes arriving to Italy, chilies arriving to Asia, corn to Africa.2:20
  26. Coffee arrives to Europe in like the 1500s and blows everyone's minds, contributes to a whole revolution in thinking.2:27
  27. It's good coffee, guys.2:38
  28. But despite all of this global trade and improvement in connecting the world and bringing flavors everywhere, food still remained quite expensive.2:39
  29. You still had to work really hard just to feed yourself and your family.2:47
  30. Agriculture and food preparation required immense physical labor, involving entire households in the effort to produce sufficient calories to survive.2:50
  31. Like, we have data from the late 1700s that shows that people in Britain spent 75 % of their income just feeding themselves.2:58
  32. Around the same time in France, they were spending about 70 % of their income on bread alone.3:06
  33. Oh my God.3:13
  34. Is there anything better than just white bread?3:15
  35. Okay, but soon that started changing and fast.3:17
  36. Let's graph it.3:20
  37. Look what happens by the year 1900.3:22
  38. Household is spending more like 42 % of their income on food.3:24
  39. Then in the 30s, it goes down to 34%, just keeps falling.3:27
  40. After World War II, something really dramatic changes in the global economy.3:30
  41. The US and its allies built a global economic system meant to connect the globe.3:36
  42. Maybe if everyone's economy was connected, it would all be benefiting too much to fight each other.3:41
  43. Was kind of the thinking.3:46
  44. And America wanted to set the rules for everyone and they successfully did.3:47
  45. And with this new system comes a whole new level of efficiency and connection.3:51
  46. Like these magical boxes that can go seamlessly from ships to trains to trucks.3:55
  47. Stratically cutting costs and loading time.4:00
  48. The world standardized around everything from railroad sizes, pallet sizes, paper sizes, bar codes, shoe sizes, screw sizes.4:03
  49. It's invisible stuff.4:10
  50. This isn't sexy, but it's important.4:11
  51. It's transformative, the whole idea being that if everyone's using the same system, everything everywhere becomes more efficient.4:13
  52. Trade gets better.4:19
  53. Now a tractor part made in South Korea snaps in nicely to a tractor in Kansas.4:20
  54. And then there was the US dollar that everyone could use as the global currency along with international agreements that laid the rules for modern trade.4:24
  55. Suddenly it's like the 1950s and the whole world is being stitched together in ways our ancient grain trading ancestors could have never imagined.4:31
  56. This is why today almost everything you touch has gone to more countries than you have.4:40
  57. Because it traverses a huge network of the global economy.4:45
  58. We call it the supply chain.4:49
  59. Like look at an iPhone, albeit kind of cracked.4:52
  60. This iPhone traveled to 43 countries before it ended up in my hands.4:55
  61. Okay, but food isn't an iPhone.4:59
  62. Food is squishy and perishable and needs to kind of be refrigerated.5:01
  63. It doesn't go through the same like advanced global supply chain that other stuff does, right?5:06
  64. Wrong, actually.5:10
  65. This is a beautiful tomato that was grown here in my local area that I bought at a farmer's market.5:13
  66. Full disclosure, did not buy this.5:20
  67. My producer bought it and I am holding it now and I will probably eat it with this bread and this coffee after I'm done shooting this video.5:22
  68. Anyway, this costs six bucks.5:29
  69. Okay, this is a six dollar tomato.5:30
  70. Take it in.5:32
  71. That beautiful tomato.5:33
  72. Wow, shoots really nicely.5:34
  73. Five miles from my house.5:35
  74. Okay, then we've got these tomatoes.5:37
  75. They don't look that much different, little more uniform.5:39
  76. These are tomatoes that came from the global economy.5:41
  77. They're all basically the exact same size.5:44
  78. These have come to me from very far away, not in this country.5:46
  79. We actually do grow a lot of tomatoes here in the United States over in California, but most of our tomatoes are grown in Mexico.5:49
  80. Four billion pounds a year come into the US.5:55
  81. So, here we are in northern Mexico, here in these endless fertile fields.5:57
  82. I've actually spent a lot of time in this region, not as a journalist, but as a Mormon missionary, riding in pickup trucks through fields that grow food destined for6:02
  83. US grocery stores.6:10
  84. En fuente.6:12
  85. Oh!6:13
  86. Anyway, let's not look at my bad Spanish.6:15
  87. Let's talk about the journey of a tomato.6:16
  88. They're often picked while they are still green.6:18
  89. They're not ripe yet.6:20
  90. Often picked by hand and then loaded into trucks.6:21
  91. A tomato like this will often go into a sealed room where they are gassed with ethylene to ripen them.6:24
  92. Ethylene is just a naturally occurring hormone that helps ripen these guys.6:29
  93. They want them to all ripen at the same time, right as they get to the grocery store.6:33
  94. But we have a long way to go before we get to the grocery store.6:36
  95. So they're pumped with this gas.6:38
  96. And then if they're going into cans, which a lot of tomatoes do, they go through this industrial factory wizardry.6:39
  97. But for the ones that are gonna end up like this, fresh, they are on a truck headed north.6:45
  98. They end up in a nearby city, probably the capital, Culiacan, in this big facility where they are sorted, chilled, and then put on big pallets.6:51
  99. They get back onto a truck, which by the way, all of these trucks are refrigerated.6:58
  100. That's a big logistical challenge to make sure these things don't get too hot or cold.7:02
  101. And now the truck is heading north.7:06
  102. It gets to the US -Mexico border.7:07
  103. Look, this is where people go back and forth between the two countries.7:09
  104. But over here is a special border crossing just for trucks.7:12
  105. Our tomatoes are in one of these.7:15
  106. It clears customs, and then it probably ends up at one of these transfer stations, where the trailer might be transferred onto another truck to an American driver who will7:16
  107. take it from there.7:24
  108. The tomatoes are now in the United States.7:25
  109. Once in the US, they might be re -ripened and repackaged, and they eventually take a long haul trip on America's freeways, ending up at a distribution center, like this7:26
  110. one in Illinois.7:36
  111. Here, tucked into the endless expanse of farmland, is this massive building surrounded by cargo trucks.7:36
  112. The tomatoes are unloaded, they're scanned for inventory, they're repackaged, and then they're back on the road, headed towards the grocery store.7:42
  113. And I promise I'm getting close here.7:49
  114. Okay, we've arrived at the grocery store.7:50
  115. This whole journey was nine days, about 1 ,000 kilometers, or 620 miles, and the tomatoes are finally stacked in the vegetable aisle, ready for you to buy a pound7:52
  116. for $2.8:00
  117. Bring them home, chop them up, and throw them into a sauce.8:01
  118. Bon appetit.8:04
  119. That was crazy, right?8:06
  120. Like that whole journey, like your tomatoes, came all the way from a farm in Mexico, and they somehow made it to the grocery store without being smashed or going8:07
  121. bad, and are somehow significantly cheaper than this.8:15
  122. How does that work?8:19
  123. Like, how does that make any sense?8:20
  124. And it's not just tomatoes.8:21
  125. Avocados are picked by hand in southern Mexico, sorted, chilled, trucked, and displayed in the northeast of the United States in the dead of winter for like three bucks.8:26
  126. Most of our vegetables in the United States come from other countries, like 60%.8:36
  127. And of course, you can imagine that it gets more complicated with animal products, eggs, milk, meat.8:40
  128. But this is your food system, our food system.8:46
  129. The majority of us participate in this food system.8:48
  130. Wait, pause.8:51
  131. I'm about to get into the part where I say why the food is more expensive, and these journeys are really important.8:52
  132. But I wouldn't be able to make these videos without sponsors, and so I need to take a moment to thank today's sponsor, who is Incogni.8:57
  133. I'm a big fan of Incogni because it has changed my world as it pertains to junk mail and robocalls and annoying texts and privacy.9:04
  134. Turns out that in the same way that there's a big, invisible market for tomato shipping, there's also an invisible market for your data, your name, your birthday, what you9:12
  135. do online, what you buy, where you live.9:22
  136. This is valuable stuff, and it is quietly traded in the background without you really knowing about it.9:26
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  143. Incogni does this in the background month after month.9:56
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  157. They continue to request that you be taken off lists.11:01
  158. The way to reclaim your privacy, if you're into that stuff, if you don't like your data being bought and sold without your explicit knowledge or permission, Incogni might be11:04
  159. a good fit for you.11:11
  160. I'm also just grateful that Incogni comes back to sponsor our videos and support our journalism.11:12
  161. We wouldn't be able to make these videos without them.11:17
  162. Okay, let's dive back in to the supply chain, the tomato journey, and the answer to this very important question.11:18
  163. So why is food suddenly way more expensive?11:27
  164. Well, there are two answers to that question that we're about to get to.11:31
  165. The first one will make a lot of intuitive sense because we just traced the journey of a tomato.11:34
  166. The second one will boil your blood.11:39
  167. Answer number one, something happens along the way.11:41
  168. Like, let's go back to this map.11:45
  169. And you see that in this journey, your tomatoes passed through farmers and packages and cold storage and drivers and customs brokers, international trade treaties, warehouses, wholesalers, grocery stores.11:46
  170. If any part of this system breaks or becomes more expensive, or if there's a power outage or a storm or a frost or a drought or gas prices spike,11:58
  171. workers go on strike, there's a new tariff, that can make any one of these steps more expensive.12:09
  172. And it is you, the final customer who will pay that price.12:14
  173. We call this a supply chain shock or shortage.12:17
  174. And it's kind of ironic that the system that makes food more accessible and cheaper is also the same system that makes our prices fragile.12:19
  175. So yeah, that's answer number one, supply chain shocks.12:28
  176. And over the last four years, I mean, you know, there's kind of been a lot.12:31
  177. There was obviously COVID, but that was just the beginning of a domino effect.12:36
  178. There was a drought in the Mediterranean, so olive oil prices went up.12:40
  179. The climate related issues have screwed up fresh produce.12:42
  180. At large, there are both climate stuff that affects how much you can grow, but also sometimes climate then interacts with like disease outbreaks.12:45
  181. They freeze in Texas, wiped out a bunch of citrus.12:53
  182. These farmers are experiencing some of the worst conditions ever.12:55
  183. Because of the drought, the ground is just not fit for grazing and like many others, the rancher here has had to call his herd because it's more economical than12:59
  184. feeding them.13:05
  185. Russia's invasion of Ukraine messed with a lot of industries.13:06
  186. The war in Ukraine spiked wheat prices there for a little bit and also spiked fertilizer prices.13:09
  187. And the issue is Russia controls one type of fertilizer, but not two others.13:14
  188. And so it meant farmers had to like retool all of their systems to switch to the other fertilizer.13:18
  189. And then there was a run on those two fertilizers.13:23
  190. Oh, palm oil got really screwed up there for a while because Indonesia decided to temporarily ban exports because prices were increasing so much that they wanted to make sure13:26
  191. that they had enough supply.13:34
  192. This was also kind of in the wake of Ukraine.13:35
  193. And so vegetable oil prices were up.13:37
  194. A hurricane in Florida messes with orange groves.13:40
  195. The Houthi rebels in Yemen are firing rockets at these merchant ships that are the lifeblood of the global economy.13:42
  196. Canada, the largest producer of kanoma oil had a big drought.13:48
  197. And so that dropped meat processing during the pandemic.13:51
  198. There were massive COVID outbreaks in meat packing.13:54
  199. And so they had slowed down a lot of line speeds because there were fewer workers.13:57
  200. And so just like less meat was getting slaughtered and packaged.14:02
  201. And then of course there were shortages in random things like packaging and trucking and cold storage and shipping containers.14:05
  202. During COVID production of aluminum cans was lower because factories were closed, but then trade wars over aluminum has affected hands.14:12
  203. And so for a while, soda was being affected and beer were being affected.14:19
  204. Each shock to the system triggers a reverberation through the rest of the system, which makes things more expensive and unpredictable.14:22
  205. The price goes up and eventually the price of your final product, the thing you see on the grocery aisle has gone up.14:31
  206. Okay, so no one's disputing that supply chain shocks are a major reason why prices have gone up.14:37
  207. But this isn't actually the full explanation.14:43
  208. There's something bigger going on here.14:45
  209. And that gets to my second answer to the question of why grocery prices are more expensive.14:47
  210. I'll just say it upfront here, which is we've all been kind of tricked.14:51
  211. And there are people making a lot of money off of us being tricked about prices.14:55
  212. Basically in COVID, I think there was kind of a reckoning of customers were pretty understanding when companies said, hey, you're going through hard times and so are we.15:00
  213. Like our costs are going up.15:09
  214. There was kind of this reset.15:10
  215. The American consumer has gotten so used to having a really cheap thing delivered to their door in like two hours, right?15:11
  216. Like an econ 101, they teach you about a supply and a demand curve, right?15:19
  217. And as you increase prices, the number of units you sell goes down.15:22
  218. And what you're trying to do is like maximize those two things.15:26
  219. So like I can sell as many products as I can make for as much as this and like that's the price.15:29
  220. The invisible hand too.15:34
  221. Right, yes.15:35
  222. And so if you increase prices, you expect intuitively to sell a little bit less.15:36
  223. Now you can like jigger it enough that like the total is a little bit higher.15:41
  224. But what companies realized is they could inch prices up and see no or very little reduction in consumer demand.15:46
  225. And so they kept doing it.15:53
  226. This will be clear very soon because there's a lot of examples of this, but the best one that is on my mind is eggs.15:54
  227. The egg prices out of control.16:00
  228. Eggs are insanely expensive right now.16:03
  229. Maybe by the time you're watching this, they will have gone down a little bit, but over the last like three, four years, egg prices have gone crazy.16:05
  230. And what's the explanation that we're all hearing?16:11
  231. Yes, the bird flu, calling millions of hens bird flu.16:13
  232. Bird flu, bird flu.16:18
  233. Already more than 90 million birds have been killed since the outbreak started.16:19
  234. I mean, if you are an egg producer and suddenly there's an outbreak of bird flu in all of your farms, like that's a huge deal.16:23
  235. That'd be like really terrible, right?16:31
  236. For your business, you're like, man, our product is being killed by a flu.16:33
  237. And wait a minute.16:37
  238. U .S.'s biggest egg producers profits triple as prices soar.16:39
  239. Wait, triple profits for the biggest egg producer.16:45
  240. Oh, and if you look at the biggest egg producers stock price, you see this, right around the time when the avian flu is happening, their stock price is going16:49
  241. nuts.16:58
  242. Time to get out their annual report.16:59
  243. Annual report for Calmain Foods Inc.17:02
  244. They're a privately traded company.17:05
  245. They must disclose all of their financials, which means we can get a little more insight as to how they fared during this time when there is a crisis in17:06
  246. our egg economy.17:16
  247. All of us are paying like more than double the price for a dozen of eggs.17:17
  248. This is 2023 and it looks like its shareholders got paid $250 million in profits.17:22
  249. Okay, it's right in the middle of the bird flu crisis.17:30
  250. You wouldn't think that they would be profiting that much, but is that a lot?17:33
  251. $250 million?17:36
  252. Maybe that's not that much.17:37
  253. Let's graph the dividends the profits paid out to shareholders.17:38
  254. Whoa, okay.17:44
  255. Well, 2023 was a great year for the largest egg producer in the United States, despite all of this avian flu.17:45
  256. So in 2023, they paid $250 million the year before they paid $6 million.17:55
  257. So they had a 40 times increase in the profits they paid out to their shareholders right in the heart of when all of us were going to restaurants and17:59
  258. seeing these signs, we're raising prices on eggs because there's a bird flu.18:07
  259. So we have to pay more.18:10
  260. But the company making the eggs is profiting a lot more money.18:11
  261. That's not just revenue.18:14
  262. It's not like they're making more money and their costs have increased a bunch.18:15
  263. They are profiting.18:18
  264. They are making way more money after all of their costs and we are all paying more.18:20
  265. Oh, and this year, 2025, their profits are up 342 % in Q2 of this year.18:25
  266. I mean, just to, Mike, drop, like, drive this home, let's put these two graphs next to each other.18:31
  267. This one is the price for a dozen eggs.18:36
  268. It's gone up a ton because of bird flu and this one is profits for shareholder of CalMain Foods going up at the same time.18:38
  269. So these graphs tell a story of a company who was able to raise prices more than what they needed to to cover their costs and they were somehow able18:45
  270. to do that.18:51
  271. Can we just look at the supply of eggs in the United States just real quick?18:51
  272. This graph, there's the price.18:58
  273. Price goes up here, right?18:59
  274. Now let's draw on the number of eggs produced in the United States during this time.19:00
  275. Here's the outbreak of the avian flu early 2023.19:05
  276. Now I'm going to draw on the number of eggs produced in the United States.19:08
  277. If I were guessing, I hadn't seen this chart before, I would imagine it would look something like this, like eggs, eggs, eggs, flu happens, production of eggs plummets.19:13
  278. When there's less supply, prices have to go up and that's why prices went up.19:20
  279. Now let's draw on the real shape.19:24
  280. Again, number of eggs producing United States.19:25
  281. Boom, kind of barely dips.19:27
  282. Yes, avian flu was a real thing.19:29
  283. I'm not like drawing some like conspiracy theory here that like this is not real, but like this crisis was as much about storytelling as it was about supply and19:31
  284. demand.19:39
  285. We all accepted way higher prices because of these signs, because of all of this news.19:39
  286. And in fact, thanks to COVID, we were kind of used to hearing about supply chains and paying higher prices and waiting longer because of something that's out of our19:45
  287. control.19:53
  288. This is the driver of inflation, right?19:54
  289. But what this story tells is that there's a company that by the way controls 25 % of the market.19:56
  290. They're a huge player, the largest player by far in the egg economy that has the ability to raise prices even when they don't need to increase costs.20:02
  291. And that company, by the way, if you chart how many eggs they were making, during the crisis, they were actually making more eggs and just selling them at a20:10
  292. way higher price.20:18
  293. So of course their profits tripled.20:19
  294. Of course their shareholders made off with huge dividends.20:21
  295. You can read a lot more about this in a couple really good reports that were very helpful for our reporting.20:24
  296. One of which concludes that corporations have used this outbreak, the avian flu, as a smoke screen for raising prices beyond what was necessary to cover any rising costs.20:29
  297. This is the kind of stuff that happens when one company owns a huge portion of an industry.20:40
  298. They just have a ton of control and they're able to manipulate the market.20:46
  299. That is supposed to be a competitive space where all the firms compete for customers by lowering their prices as much as they possibly can.20:50
  300. But our modern food system has become more and more consolidated.20:56
  301. Four firms handle 85 % of all beef processing in the US.21:00
  302. Three companies control 78 % of all pasta.21:04
  303. Two firms own 70 % of the cantuna industry.21:07
  304. One company dominates seed genetics.21:10
  305. 70 % of all grocery stores flow through just four chains.21:13
  306. This level of consolidation means that companies don't compete on prices, they match prices and when there is a crisis, they're able to take advantage of that to help spread21:17
  307. the narrative and signal to the rest of us that prices have gone up because of this crisis and really they're just patting their bottom line.21:27
  308. There's a bunch of lawsuits happening right now because of this.21:33
  309. McDonald's is suing meat companies for colluding to keep prices high.21:35
  310. Frozen potatoes for your french fries.21:40
  311. Also very consolidated.21:42
  312. Also some price manipulation allegations there.21:43
  313. A big turkey producer is in the middle of a price fixing scandal.21:46
  314. They've had to pay out settlements.21:49
  315. $32 million here, $4 million there.21:51
  316. I mean this is kind of a cost of doing business when you are a big industrial food producer and you use your power to cash in.21:54
  317. So we've been told a story that these crises, COVID and supply chain shocks are at the root of inflation of prices going up.22:00
  318. But there's now pretty compelling evidence that corporate profits, the ability to take advantage of these crisis to raise prices above where they need to be is a major driver22:08
  319. of inflation.22:16
  320. Meaning we're paying more money and we're making these companies way richer.22:17
  321. Corporate profits are at an all time high despite some volatility in the economy.22:21
  322. Last year margins reached over 16 % which is the highest on record since 1950.22:26
  323. And it's not just in food, it's across all sectors.22:31
  324. The CFO of Hershey in 2023 said on an earnings call to the company shareholders quote, pricing and productivity gains more than offset inflation and higher manufacturing and overhead costs.22:34
  325. In non Wall Street speak that says, we increased our prices well above what our increased costs were.22:46
  326. Like our costs for sugar, cocoa, et cetera have gone up but we have been able to not only pass all of those costs onto consumers but then some increasing22:54
  327. our profit margin.23:03
  328. Hershey's wasn't the only company to say this.23:04
  329. Virtually like the vast majority of S &P 500 companies said this Frito -Lay and PepsiCo for example, did the same thing where they said, we've been able to rapidly23:06
  330. increase kind of our pricing actions is what they call them which is these increasing prices.23:15
  331. So profits are soaring while a family of four who's surviving on a thrifty food plan is seeing their costs for food increase by 30 % or more over the23:20
  332. last few years.23:31
  333. More and more are turning to government programs.23:32
  334. And so now our taxpayer dollars are going to help inflated prices to make shareholders rich.23:34
  335. It's not a good setup.23:41
  336. It's not a good set of incentives.23:42
  337. It's not a free market.23:44
  338. This isn't good.23:45
  339. And yet luckily there is some hope here.23:46
  340. The Department of Justice is already investigating this egg price fixing allegation.23:48
  341. Calmain has already been accused of doing this in previous disease outbreaks.23:53
  342. Now the largest supplier of eggs in the US now under federal investigation related to sky high prices that consumers saw for several months.23:58
  343. But what really needs to happen is a breaking up of these food companies that have so much power in the market.24:06
  344. Food isn't like other things.24:12
  345. It's not like vacations and cars and things that are discretionary.24:14
  346. It is our basic survival.24:18
  347. We have antitrust laws.24:19
  348. We have other laws that protect small businesses.24:21
  349. And this current crisis is rejuvenating a discourse around seeing what the government can do to actually make prices more affordable to everyday Americans.24:24
  350. There's also a necessary reckoning with how reliant we are on these far flung supply chains.24:33
  351. COVID really started this.24:39
  352. And you're starting to see more and more stuff come regional and local.24:40
  353. Mexico is experimenting with the government coming in and putting a price control for a basic basket of food using their power to negotiate with food corporations to keep prices24:44
  354. affordable for the basics.24:54
  355. One place that grocery prices really didn't increase all that much was Mexico.24:56
  356. And that's because Claudia Scheinbaum's administration did this thing called in Spanish, it translates to basic basket.24:59
  357. And so for the equivalent of like $40, you can get enough food to feed your family of like rice, beef, a couple of vegetables, a gallon of milk, these25:05
  358. basics.25:13
  359. And in fact, that price has come down by like 12 % over the past year.25:14
  360. And she did this, it's effectively a price control, but it's a voluntary.25:17
  361. So in fact, Walmart of Mexico participates in this program.25:21
  362. But she got a bunch of farmers and suppliers and retailers to all buy into this program.25:24
  363. They should negotiate this big deal.25:30
  364. And they all offer like a basic basket of goods for a low price for Mexican families.25:31
  365. She just used kind of the weight of the government to say, hey, I think grocery should be cheaper for Mexicans and how can we work together to do it?25:36
  366. So there is some movement happening here.25:52
  367. The reality is our food system is amazing.25:54
  368. It has made food much cheaper than it was, but it has some real weaknesses, weaknesses that are being exposed in the last few years and that a lot of25:57
  369. people are feeling when they go to the grocery store.26:06
  370. Those are market failures.26:08
  371. And that is where the government steps in to ensure that our food system works for the consumers, the people who need to be able to rely on affordable food26:10
  372. and not for the corporations that provide it.26:17

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