(The Economic Collapse Blog)—They have officially ruined breakfast. Once upon a time, breakfast was the least expensive meal of the day, but now everything has changed. Eggs, butter and coffee have all become extremely expensive, and there is no relief in sight in 2025.
When I went to the grocery store on Friday, I spent about 45 dollars for just nine tubs of butter. I could hardly believe my eyes, but after doing some digging I discovered that five dollars for a pound of butter is very close to the national average at this stage.
Of course in some areas it is even more expensive. During an exchange on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, Joe Scarborough was astounded to learn that the price of butter has reached 7 dollars in some stores in his area…
“It’s $7… I’m just saying it’s 7,” Brzezinski interrupted.
“Butter is $7… What, is it framed in gold?” Scarborough replied incredulously, with a look of shock on his face.
“It’s seven bucks…. it depends where you go,” Brzezinski stated somberly.
Europe is facing a similar crisis.
In fact, the price of butter in Europe jumped by an average of 19 percent during the 12 month period ending in October…
Across the 27-member states of the European Union, the price of butter rose 19% on average from October 2023 to October 2024.
That included a rise of 49% in Slovakia, and 40% in Germany and the Czech Republic, according to EU figures with reports indicating the cost has continued to rise.
But they keep telling us that inflation is under control.
Yeah, right.
Egg prices have been rising even more rapidly.
In some areas of California, a carton of 12 eggs will now cost you 9 dollars…
Egg prices in California have reached unprecedented levels, with some areas reporting costs as high as $9 per dozen. This surge is largely attributed to the ongoing impact of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), commonly known as bird flu, which has significantly disrupted egg supply across the United States.
The price escalation in California is particularly notable. While the national average for a dozen Grade A large eggs hovers around $3.20, in California, the average price for a carton of white cage-free eggs has hit $5.11. However, in certain regions, consumers are seeing prices nearly double that amount.
I vividly remember when you could buy a carton of 12 eggs for less than a dollar. Sadly, those days are long gone and they aren’t coming back.
It is being reported that egg prices have risen 160 percent since 2019, and they are expected to go substantially higher in 2025 because of the bird flu.
If you love coffee, you should be aware that coffee prices are also being projected to continue to rise at an exponential rate in 2025.
Can you imagine paying 8 dollars for a single cup of coffee? Well, those that live in Australia could be doing exactly that by the end of this calendar year…
Coffee lovers could soon not be able to justify buying their caffeine fix daily with experts warning single cup could cost from $8-$12 by the end of 2025.
A confluence of factors has pushed Arabica bean prices into the stratosphere.
If you can believe it, the price of a pound of Arabica beans jumped more than 80 percent in 2024…
The warning comes as the price of Arabica beans, the world’s most popular variety, continues to rise.
Buying a pound of the bean variety topped US $3.44 on December 10, having risen more than 80 per cent in 2024.
Chocolate prices are entering unprecedented territory as well.
In 2024, cocoa futures actually tripled in price…
Prices for chocolate’s main ingredient have almost tripled since the start of 2024 as faltering production in West Africa — the world’s biggest growing region — led to massive supply shortages, the publication wrote, citing exchange data.
In early January, cocoa futures traded at around $4,000 per tonne. In mid-December they peaked at $12,700 per tonne, according to data from Trading Economics.
As this price shift starts filtering down to the consumer level, a lot of us won’t be able to afford to eat as much chocolate as we once did.
In fact, we have already reached a point where chocolate is being referred to as a “luxury” item.
If you love beef, I have more bad news for you.
According to Zero Hedge, cattle futures just hit another new all-time record high…
Cattle futures in Chicago surged to fresh record highs on Friday, driven by severe winter weather forecasts for the Central Plains and Midwest, two key regions home to the nation’s cattle belt. Analysts warn that the harsh conditions could reduce herd sizes and impact carcass weights, further tightening the nation’s cattle supply.
“While cattle can tolerate cold weather, extreme cold forces them to expend more energy, directly impacting feed conversion rates and ultimately reducing carcass weights,” Daily Livestock Report wrote in a note on Friday, warning that cattle weights fell 3% during last year’s cold blast across the Lower 48.
Demand for beef remains very robust, but the size of the U.S. national cattle herd just keeps shrinking.
At this point, it is the smallest that it has been since 1961.
So beef prices will just keep escalating in 2025.
You could try switching to chicken or turkey, but they are both becoming more expensive thanks to the bird flu.
The bottom line is that we are transitioning into an entirely new environment.
We were quite accustomed to living in a society that produced enormous quantities of extremely inexpensive food.
But now global food supplies are steadily getting tighter, and global food prices are steadily marching upwards.
Hunger is on the rise all over the world, and demand at food banks in the United States is higher than ever before.
Years in advance, I explained to my readers in excruciating detail where global food production trends would be taking us.
Sadly, it will not be possible for our leaders to reverse those trends.
Horrifying global food shortages are in our future, and I would suggest that you prepare accordingly.
Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.