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Moon cake market starts early with higher prices
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The moon cake market for this year’s mid-autumn festival has made an earlier start over last year with higher prices due to rising input costs and soaring prices of food, rice and cooking gas.

Many well-known bakeries including Kinh Do, Dong Khanh, Bibica and Thanh Long have started production for the moon festival since mid July, two months ahead of the festival.

Most of the moon cake makers said prices this year would be 15 to 30 percent higher than last year since input cost soared.

“Flour, sugar and salted duck egg prices rose by 40 percent, 60 percent and 77 percent respectively,” Thanh Long Moon Cake Company said.

Kinh Do, Bibica and Dong Khanh all announced price hikes of between 10 and 20 percent over last year, standing around VND65,000-120,000 (US$3-6) a cake.

However, Tuoi Tre found out that prices could actually be higher as the producers have reduced the cake’s weight.

A 210-g moon cake with ham, for instance, is sold at VND72,000 each, while consumers had to spend only VND66,000 for a 300-g cake of the same kind last year.

This week (August 1-7) also sees many price hikes in essentials including rice, pork and cooking gas.

Rice prices increased by 10 percent over last week, why grain prices of this year’s summer-autumn crop surged by 54 percent over last year.

The director of a Tien Giang-based rice exporter attributed the price increase to the 15-percent hike in the rice exporting contracts of the domestic rice firms.

“Since a large amount of rice has been exported, there is not much [rice] left on stock,” he said. “The exporters have to increase prices of the summer-autumn crop to have rice for exports.”

Meanwhile, prices of pork, beef and poultry meat have also surged by up to 40 percent as of August.

The 12-percent increase of feed prices and the 30-percent hike in maintenance cost have sent food prices skyrocket, many producers said.

For their parts, cooking gas suppliers Saigon Petro, Petrolimex Saigon have announced a retail price increase of VND8,000 per cylinder early this week, after two reductions in the last two months.

The move was made after global contract price has surged by $25 per ton.