Local bakeries continuing to struggle with inflation

If you’ve gone to the grocery store over the past year, you’ve noticed your grocery bill has gone up quite a bit.

For those who own a bakery and deli like Barry Wilkie, it means his bill has skyrocketed.

He owns the 1205 Bakery and Deli in Regina and is feeling the pinch in his wallet right now.

“A pan of cinnamon buns takes a pound of butter. Butter was around $4 to $5 (just over a year ago) and now it’s $8 or $6. It fluctuates all over the place,” he said. “One day it’s cheaper and one day it’s more. It’s usually more money.

“Flour has gone up a couple bucks, sugar has gone up, brown sugar has gone up. Everything has probably gone up 10 to 20 per cent more.”

And Wilkie said that’s just on the baking side of things. As someone who owns a deli and has to cook food, he says that side of the business is seeing a big difference compared to the past year and a half.

“We cook our own turkeys and beef. A 10-kilogram box of turkey breasts is $125 and we were paying at one time around $80,” Wilkie said. “There’s a huge fluctuation in there.”

The good news is that over the past couple of months, the supply chain has been able to stabilize. But Wilkie said there was a period where he had a tough time finding items.

“Lettuce was a tough thing to find. Turkey has been a tough thing to find because of that avian flu. Butter’s on there too,” he explained.

While the price of everything has gone up, Wilkie noted his bakery and deli has only raised prices slightly in order to keep people coming through the door.

He says right now, it hasn’t been smooth sailing working in the food business.

“The margins are not there. It’s very hard to make money in the food business right now,” Wilkie said.

But he said he’ll keep working hard to keep his services around.

“We’ve been doing it a long time,” he said. “We’ve got great customers and we’ll just keep grinding away. It’s what we’ve done for so long.”