Food Inflation Continues To Strain South African Households Despite Short Term Price Relief

Wael Khoury, managing director of Tetra Pak Southern Africa.

Modest, but real. What the number does not answer is the question that matters more: what actually determines the price of food?

The year-on-year picture is less comfortable. Food basket costs are still R70.59 higher than February 2025, a 1,3% increase. CPI food inflation is running at 4,4%, ahead of headline inflation at 3,5%.

For households already stretched, food is outpacing everything else. The monthly dip is welcome. The underlying problem has not moved.

The PMBEJD data makes that pressure concrete.

A worker on the National Minimum Wage earning R4,606.40 in February, supporting a family of four, has R1,151.60 per person per month. That is below the National Lower-Bound Poverty Line of R1,415. The household food basket at R5,383.81 is already beyond reach on a single minimum wage income.

More telling is the gap between what families actually buy and what they should eat for basic nutrition. That gap is R1,076.02 every month.

The food manufacturing sector should sit with that number. As a company that works directly with food producers across the region on processing and packaging systems, Tetra Pak sees where those costs are built and where they can be reduced.

Efficiency is a pricing decision

By the time a product reaches the shelf, its price is already set. Energy consumption, production waste, spoilage rates and logistics have all taken their cut. When those costs run high, margins shrink. When margins shrink, products either get more expensive or disappear.

When inefficiency adds cost at the production level, that cost moves. It works through the supply chain and lands in the household budget. The family buying maize meal or cooking oil at a township spaza shop is not insulated from what happens on a factory floor hundreds of kilometres away.

Efficient thermal processing cuts energy use. Aseptic packaging extends shelf life without refrigeration, reducing cold chain dependency and the spoilage losses that come with it. Reduced material waste across the production line adds up to real cost savings over time.

At Tetra Pak, this is the standard we hold ourselves to in every system we build for food producers across the region. None of it is visible to the consumer. All of it influences what they pay.

The cold chain problem

A product that travels without refrigeration costs less to move, spoils less in transit and reaches more points of sale. The savings accumulate at every stage and show up, eventually, in the price the consumer pays.

In South Africa, where distribution infrastructure is uneven and energy costs are punishing, that matters more than most manufacturers acknowledge.

Removing cold chain requirements from even a handful of product categories reduces cost and risk across the entire supply chain, not just at one point in it. In a market where butternut dropped 12% in a single month and onions climbed 9%, that consistency is worth more than any short-term price movement.

Where the real work starts

Currency pressure, energy costs and input volatility are beyond any single manufacturer's control. Structural inefficiency is not. Manufacturers that invest in processing technology, waste reduction and shelf life optimisation build a cost base that absorbs pressure rather than passing it on.

Every month, the food basket numbers land and families adjust accordingly. The food manufacturing sector has more influence over those numbers than most people realise. That influence is not exercised in pricing meetings. It is exercised on the factory floor, long before the product reaches the shelf.

Affordability is an engineering problem as much as it is an economic one. The industry has the tools. Using them is a choice.