BREAKING: The First Crack In The Dam
One of the nation’s five largest food distributors is now quietly pulling back from the massive wholesale margin increases that helped drive the grocery inflation wave since 2021 — including the notorious “auto-padding” markup that insiders say added up to 30% to thousands of products. Is the dam finally cracking? And what does that mean for consumers?
Welcome To The New Normal
If you want the New Normal to end, stop shouting into the void and start shoving this data into the agencies that are supposed to protect you. Send this story — and the Mona Lisa Graph — to three places: the FTC’s Consumer Protection Bureau, your State Attorney General, and your U.S. Representative’s office. Tell them exactly what you now know: diesel prices collapsed, Big Food’s costs didn’t rise, and the CPI never came back down.
The Mona Lisa Graph Returns
This isn’t a market correction. It’s a margin extraction — and the fingerprints are all over BigFood.
For the past two months, SpokenFood has been dissecting what we’ve called the Price Gouging Conspiracy — a coordinated silence among major producers, distributors, and retailers who continue inflating prices under the pretense of “supply-chain recovery.” In truth, their supply chains recovered long ago.
C&S / SpartanNash Merger Tightens the Noose
Let’s do the math. If C&S touches roughly 7,500 stores pre-merger and SpartanNash’s wholesale network spans another 2,500, that’s about 10,000 retail outlets whose shelf pricing can be influenced by a single procurement ecosystem. Add in 60 distribution centers, unified freight contracts, centralized purchasing power, and national vendor terms, and you’ve created something close to a food-supply monopoly in everything but name.
BigFood Exposed: Silence IS Agreement
(Editor’s Note: Based upon last-minute discussions, Hy-Vee was offered an exclusive interview with SpokenFood today, before publication of this story. The company declined to participate–sort of. -SN)
Over the past two weeks, SpokenFood reached out to numerous wholesale food distributors representing retail grocery stores, namely the ones pictured above. We asked the question everyone in America has been wondering:
“Why do your food prices keep rising?”
SpokenFood recently researched ‘Food-At-Home’ costs from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) as part of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). We put their numbers side-by-side on a chart with updated diesel fuel prices. See that chart below. It jumps out at you.
In the course of reporting this story, SpokenFood contacted those four distributors. Their replies became a pattern—one of silence, delay, and even outright error-in-fact.