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What a sour note to sound at the beginning of baking season. First, the price of sugar goes up. Then we hear that canned pumpkin may be in short supply.
If you hadn't noticed the canned pumpkin shortage, it may already be over. It was apparently a blip, caused by bad weather last year.
There have been scattered reports of stores running out, but the word is that this year's crop is in the can and the cans are headed to stores.
Jennifer Thompson of Harris Teeter said they were getting a big shipment Tuesday.
You might see spotty cases of empty shelves, but that may be the self-fulfilling nature of shortages: You hear about a shortage, you buy more and voila - there's a shortage.
Sugar price increases are more complicated. Yes, sugar prices have been going up and are expected to go up a little more through the rest of the year. How much they're up depends on who you ask.
Restaurant Depot, a trade-only restaurant supply store on Wilkinson Boulevard, is limiting sugar purchases to five bags per customer to protect their supply.
Butch Wesley, an assistant branch manager, said the price has gone up so quickly, every shipment comes in with a higher price. He guessed it's gone up 25 percent in the last six weeks.
Lynn St. Laurent, the co-owner of Amelie's Bakery, buys sugar from Restaurant Depot. She has filled her office with sugar to handle the limit. "We are making sure we have plenty of sugar on hand," she said.
At the retail level, Thompson said Harris Teeter has seen sugar increases but has been trying to absorb the change so they don't pass on big bumps to customers.
Of course, the price of sugar doesn't just show up on the 5-pound bag - it goes into a lot of products.
But I got a different perspective when I was in Louisiana with the Association of Food Journalists earlier this month. We spent a day in the sugar cane fields near Baton Rouge, and prices were a big subject.
Charles Barkley of the Sugar Processing Institute explained that there really isn't a shortage. The price of sugar is based on the world stockpile of sugar.
The stockpile is lower than it has been in years. That's because of things such as floods and droughts in India and the increase in the use of sugar for biofuels by big sugar producers like Brazil.
Food producers also are shifting away from high-fructose corn syrup and back to cane sugar. That affects supply, too.
But for American sugar producers, this is the first increase they're seen in almost 20 years. Barkley pointed out that's like not getting a raise for 20 years. That means no new equipment, no investing in improvements so they can compete in the global market.
"For all the U.S. sugar industry, this is a shot in the arm," he said. "We're just hanging on."
So even a price increase can be good news for somebody.
