Lettuce prices have nearly tripled in the past year for some P.E.I. restaurants

Inflation has been hitting Islanders hard for months at the grocery stores. But rising food prices aren't just affecting individuals, they're also impacting restaurants with already-slim margins.

One perhaps unexpected area that's seen huge price jumps is leafy greens. Particularly romaine lettuce.

"It's tripled in price," said Nikki Cudmore, supervising waitress at Little Christo's Pizzeria in Charlottetown.

Last year, a box of 27 romaine lettuce heads cost Cudmore's restaurant about $63. "We're now looking at $165 for a full box," Cudmore said. "So we're not even making any money off of any of our products that have lettuce in them anymore."

Cudmore said it's forced the shop owner to take a hard look at their pricing. 

"One thing my boss prides himself on is that we do try to keep our prices low for our customers," she said. "But now, with especially lettuce being a main point, for some reason it's impossible to keep our prices down. So we do unfortunately, like all of the other businesses, have to raise our prices."

The main thing that Little Christo's uses romaine for is salads, and the most expensive of those is the Greek salad, with other expensive ingredients like feta, tomatoes and olives.

"You're coming to approximately $11 to create the salad from start to finish, including the to-go box, sauce, everything like that. And right now we're currently charging $8 so we're actually losing money by using lettuce products in our restaurant."

Other restaurants are seeing similar price increases.

Matthew Feehan is corporate chef for Red Island Hospitality and does the menu planning and purchasing for Hunter's Ale House, The Factory Downtown, the Charlottetown Beer Garden, the John Brown Richmond Street Grille, and Phinley's Restaurant.

For their restaurants, a case of 24 heads of lettuce can cost anywhere between $160 and $180 from a local supplier, upwards of $220 a case from a larger supplier.

"This time last year, we were probably sitting at almost $100 less a case," Feehan said. "And that's just strictly romaine. We no longer use leaf lettuce there because it's almost $500 a case."

Feehan said Red Island Hospitality has also been having discussions about whether to stop using so much lettuce.

"When do we stop? What price point does it hit when we say we're not serving caesar salad?" he said.