Pizza makers Emmanuel Escamilla (foreground) and James Holmes (left) cranked out dozens of pies for the lunchtime crowd at Bronx Pizza in Hillcrest yesterday.
A Slice Today Costs Business Owners ‘Extra Cheese’
No matter how you slice it, making pizza is getting more pricey.
The culprit: the rising cost of cheese and wheat, two of the beloved pizza pie’s main ingredients.
In his nearly 30 years of business, Jim DiMille, co-owner of DiMille’s Italian Restaurant in Normal Heights, has never seen anything like the recent price jumps.
Cheese prices are up by more than half, and wheat prices have risen by as much as 80 percent. That has put DiMille and other local pizzerias in a tough position: Stand pat on prices and see profits evaporate, or raise prices on already-strapped consumers who may decide to stay home.
DiMille already increased menu prices by 10 percent at the beginning of the year and now is seeing his food costs rise further.
“It’s a footrace. We just did a menu increase,” he said. “Now we’re getting a second round of price increases. We’ll just have to swallow it. It’s tough. There’s really no keeping up with it.”
Corn prices have gone up as the crop is diverted to produce ethanol. So as the livestock feed becomes more expensive, milk becomes more expensive and, no surprise, cheese becomes more costly, too.
“Corn is really driving all of this,” said Jeff Davis, president of Sandelman & Associates, a restaurant industry consulting firm. “Corn is impacting beef, it’s impacting dairy, it’s impacting wheat.”
The price of block cheese closed yesterday at $2.07 a pound on the Chicago Board of Trade. A year ago, block cheese was $1.35 a pound. Wheat, which historically has traded in the $3-to-$7-a-bushel range, hit a record $13.50 on Wednesday and closed at $10.86 yesterday.
Matt Gardner, owner of Bronx Pizza in Hillcrest, said the price of cheese is really hitting his bottom line. He estimates that Bronx Pizza uses about a pound of the stuff on each of the 3,500 pizzas it makes a week. With the price of cheese up by about $1 a pound, that’s $3,500 less profit a week.
“That’s straight-up money that would normally be in your pocket,” Gardner said.
Nevertheless, he said he has no plans to raise prices this year because his business has higher volume and lower overhead than many other pizza places in town.
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