Why has Milk gone up so much lately?

MiserlyMartin

Currently at Aldi a 4 pint of milk is 95p. At Tesco its £1.

I can remember the price being as low as 75 - 79p last year when the farmers were moaning about it. Since then its on an upward spiral.

But this http://dairy.ahdb.org.uk/market-information/milk-prices-contracts/farmgate-prices/eu-farmgate-milk-prices/#.V0mjL77zGUk

says the wholesale price is falling. So whats going on? Any resident milk experts here?

Marktheshark

Our currency is devalued to help the Euro stay afloat.

alanq

MySupermarket.co.uk says 4pts of semi-skimmed at ALDI is 89p.

Also 89p at Iceland.

Supermarkets have had to implement the so-called "National Living Wage" and incur other increased costs of employing staff. Perhaps they are choosing to offset this by increasing the margin on things that they know we will buy regardless.

HappyMJ

MiserlyMartin wrote: »

Currently at Aldi a 4 pint of milk is 95p. At Tesco its £1.

I can remember the price being as low as 75 - 79p last year when the farmers were moaning about it. Since then its on an upward spiral.

But this http://dairy.ahdb.org.uk/market-information/milk-prices-contracts/farmgate-prices/eu-farmgate-milk-prices/#.V0mjL77zGUk

says the wholesale price is falling. So whats going on? Any resident milk experts here?

The £1 price you pay for 4 pints is actually a loss leader.

The wholesale price of milk is falling but there is still no profit to be made at £1 for 4 pints.

You need to look at the price for 1 pint which has gone down from 49 pence to 45 pence.

cattie

Instead of looking for the cheapest milk, it would be a better idea to buy from somewhere such as Lidl, who source their milk from UK suppliers who pay more to our dairy farmers than many other supermarkets do. In doing this, it's only a few pennies more to each of us who buy milk, but could be the difference between a farmer staying afloat or having to completely give up due to the supermarkets driving a very hard bargain for milk supplies.

MiserlyMartin

Marktheshark wrote: »

Our currency is devalued to help the Euro stay afloat.

I agree with your sentiments but the £ is back up to 1.31 - a 3 month high against the euro

MiserlyMartin

alanq wrote: »

MySupermarket.co.uk says 4pts of semi-skimmed at ALDI is 89p.

Also 89p at Iceland.

Supermarkets have had to implement the so-called "National Living Wage" and incur other increased costs of employing staff. Perhaps they are choosing to offset this by increasing the margin on things that they know we will buy regardless.

Thats a bit strange as I was in Aldi this morning and paid my 95p. Could mysupermarket be incorrect? I don't really see the point of that site since it is very difficult to compare prices unless you log out of one shop and into the other. I'd like to search for an item, it tell me the cheapest shop and have 4 orders on the go with 4 supermarkets at once if needed. Anyway possibly milk is the culprit of the "living wage". Although milk is a sensitive thing, its one thing that people monitor so the cheapest shop on milk is usually the one that people do the rest of their shopping at. So I can't imagine they would let this feed through to milk. Unless its a joint price fixing thing.

MiserlyMartin

cattie wrote: »

Instead of looking for the cheapest milk, it would be a better idea to buy from somewhere such as Lidl, who source their milk from UK suppliers who pay more to our dairy farmers than many other supermarkets do. In doing this, it's only a few pennies more to each of us who buy milk, but could be the difference between a farmer staying afloat or having to completely give up due to the supermarkets driving a very hard bargain for milk supplies.

Have you ever seen a poor farmer in the UK? I haven't, they all seem to be well off, posh and drive very new range rovers.

MiserlyMartin

HappyMJ wrote: »

The £1 price you pay for 4 pints is actually a loss leader.

The wholesale price of milk is falling but there is still no profit to be made at £1 for 4 pints.

You need to look at the price for 1 pint which has gone down from 49 pence to 45 pence.

So they have raised the price of a 4 pint bottle to bring down the 1 pint bottle? I suppose that makes sense. I struggle to use 4 pints sometimes in a week but it makes no sense to buy 2 pints for 70p when you could buy 4 for 85p.

alanq

MiserlyMartin wrote: »

Thats a bit strange as I was in Aldi this morning and paid my 95p.

I just did the same.
MySupermarket.co.uk
"We get prices for their products using different methods; from checking real-world stores, to checking supermarket/retailer websites. In most cases we update prices daily, however, for supermarkets/retailers that don’t sell products through their websites, we update prices 1-2 times per week, as we can’t cross-check the corresponding website every day. This means that because prices can change daily there could occasionally be differences."

http://help.mysupermarket.co.uk/index.php/knowledgebase/are-product-prices-and-special-offers-up-to-date-2/

MiserlyMartin wrote: »

I don't really see the point of that site since it is very difficult to compare prices unless you log out of one shop and into the other. I'd like to search for an item, it tell me the cheapest shop ...

Find the item in your favourite store. Double-click on the picture of the item. The price of that item at all other monitored stores (when last checked) is displayed.

peewhyeff

Buy in Farmfoods. 2 x 2L fresh semi-skimmed or whole for £1.00. (That's 7 pints for £1.00.