When Bread Becomes Too Costly for Breakfast – Addisu Frtune  21:56

IN A NUTSHELL

For Helen Mekonnen, 45, bread has become the measure of how far a household income can stretch in Addis Abeba. In the neighbourhood near Bulgaria St. Michael, on Tanzania St., a loaf that once was a routine purchase now requires a daily calculation before breakfast.

Bread was not a luxury in her home. Her 15-year-old son, Elfaz Tadesse, does not have much appetite for injera. Instead, he insists on having bread with every meal. She spends at least 75 Br a day on bread, making it nearly impossible to cover the rest of our daily groceries. Helen blames herself with a mother’s regret.

“I raised him that way,” she told Fortune. “It’s very difficult to force him to switch to injera overnight.”

To keep him fed, she buys five loaves every morning. The loaves have grown smaller as prices have climbed.

“The bread I’m buying is so small I don’t think a toddler can be full with only one bread for a meal,” said Helen.

Her husband earns 9,000 Br a month, but that income is absorbed by teff flour, electricity, water and rent. Helen covers the daily groceries with her earnings from her work as a neighbourhood janitor, earning 2,100 Br a month.

“Groceries are my responsibility,” she said. “I work around the neighbourhood to fulfil my obligation as a mother and as a wife.”

However, her work is not steady relief. It fills only part of the gap left after rent and utilities. Bread, teff flour and cooking supplies compete for the same notes in her purse, turning each purchase into a choice about what can wait. Helen does not see her family’s stress as exceptional.

“Everyone in my community is struggling,” she said. “We’re all trying to find a way to put food on the table for our families.”

In Tulu Dimtu, under the Sheger City Administration, Etsegenet Teklu faces the same squeeze from another side of the city. A stay-at-home mother of two daughters, ages 12 and eight, she found that bakery bread has become too costly for a household living on a monthly salary paid to a nurse working at a public health facility.

“Why would I buy bread that costs the equivalent of a whole day’s worth of groceries?” she quipped.

Rather than mask the pressure, Etsegenet explained it to her daughters. She sits with her daughters and explains the situation.

“They’re young, but they’re incredibly understanding,” Etsegenet told Fortune. “They know exactly why we simply can’t afford it right now.”

The lesson has not erased their longing. When a guest recently asked the girls what treat they wanted, they did not ask for sweets but bread from the Bakery. It was a small request, but it captured how a basic food has slipped into the category of a guest’s present.

The pressure felt in many households starts farther up the chain, in bakeries where managers now price every gram. On Gabon Street in Mesqel Flower, Patina Bakery’s ovens still run in the morning, but Muluken Hailu, its general manager, observed the economy changing. A standard loaf now sells for 15 Br, up 50pc from 10 Br a month ago. He attributed the sudden spike to the recent surge in gas prices.

Higher fuel prices have increased transport costs at every stage of the supply chain. The Bakery has adjusted both price and weight. The loaves from Patina Bakery, even after the price increase, weigh between 75Gm and 80Gm.

The wholesale market has moved sharply, too. A quintal of all-purpose flour now sells for 12,000 Br, up by 3,000 Br in a matter of weeks. Retail flour has followed. A kilo that sold for 100 Br a month ago went up by 50pc last week. The result is a cautious trade in which bakeries keep selling, but customers and producers weigh each Birr and gram more carefully. For bakers, the choice is uncomfortable as passing the full increase to customers risks losing them and holding prices steady means selling smaller loaves or accepting margins that cannot cover labour, fuel and inputs.

The smell of fresh bread remains, but the business behind it has become more delicate. When the prices of staple grains, flour-based foods, and bread change even moderately, the effect ripples through household budgets like those of Helen and Estegenet.

Within the food basket of prices, bread and cereals jumped by a more modest 5.1pc. Their significance lies less in the pace of the increase than in their weight, accounting for 17.1pc of the total CPI basket, the largest share among major food items listed in the CPI. That makes bread and cereals quite an inflation heavyweight.

Official data may reveal a cooling inflation rate, but the country’s breadbasket is still sending a warning. The Ethiopian Statistical Service’s latest consumer price bulletin shows headline inflation at 11.7pc in April this year, down from 14.4pc a year earlier. However, food inflation climbed faster, reaching 13.5pc year-on-year (YoY).

On a monthly rate, bread and cereals increased 1.7pc between March and April, against a 2.4pc increase for food and non-alcoholic beverages as a whole. The increase was smaller than the month-on-month rise in meat, at 3.4pc, and oils and fats, at four percent. But bread is different, for it is not a discretionary purchase. It sits in the daily diet, in school lunches, in urban kiosks, in roadside eateries and in the wage earner’s breakfast. A mild rise, repeated often enough, becomes a squeeze.

Abdulhakim Redi, deputy chief executive of Hanan Plc in Furi District, Sheger City Administration, blamed the rise in flour prices on recent fuel increases and the Minimum Alternative Tax (MAT).

“The market moved with steady momentum until fuel hikes began two months ago,” he said.

Since then, logistics and transport costs have risen by over 200pc, adding pressure on manufacturing and supply operations.

At Enbut Bakery, near Fikremariam Aba Techan St. in Piassa St. George Church, the first constraint came from diesel, on which the Bakery’s machines depend to operate.

“The first problem we faced was diesel,” said Salim Hamza, the general manager.

A shutdown was only avoided after officials at the Arada District Trade Bureau granted the District Trade Bureau direct access to fuel allocations to protect the area’s bread supply. Fuel access, however, did not solve the larger problem of cost. Enbut buys wheat flour at 11,000 Br a quintal. Transport costs have fallen by half to 200 Br a quintal, but the relief is not enough under fixed retail expectations. The Bakery sells a 70Gg loaf for 10 Br and a 90Gg loaf for 15 Br.

“This is not profitable at all,” Salim said.

Management plans to raise the 70Gg loaf by three Birr and reduce the weight of the 15 Br loaf. The decision embodies a trade-off spreading through the market, in which bakeries can raise prices, shrink loaves, or absorb losses. Few can do the last for long. The squeeze is especially sharp for bakeries that serve crowded neighbourhoods, where consumers are price-sensitive and buy bread in small daily quantities. In such markets, a price change depresses demand, while a few grams less a loaf can prompt complaints to regulators from households already cutting other expenses.

Those in the flour industry trace pricing issues to volatile logistics. Umer K. Flour Factory has seen domestic freight charges swing sharply in recent weeks. A month ago, the company paid 1,000 Br a quintal to transport grain from local smallholders to its plant in Gedeb Asasa, Oromia Regional State, a grain-producing corridor. Farm-gate logistics have eased to 500 Br a quintal, but overhead costs remain high.

The movement of wheat from farmers to mills and of flour from mills to bakeries has become the decisive cost in a chain that once operated with more predictable costs. The Factory processes flour at 11,000 Br a quintal, which its Management says reflected transport volatility rather than discretionary pricing. Millers are also dealing with Value-Added Tax (VAT) administration and transport costs, which are made worse by inefficient logistics infrastructure.

Leaders of the Ethiopian Millers Association, a national lobby with more than 200 members, warn that regulatory and logistical pressures are pushing up prices for flour, pasta and other staples. According to Dereje Zeleke (PhD), president of the Association, the Minimum Alternative Tax could erode narrower margins.

“A one-size-fits-all regulatory framework can’t address agribusiness conditions,” he told Fortune. “Taxes are necessary, but they should be regulated accordingly.”

Without adjustment, the Association’s leaders cautioned that financial pressure could encourage contraband trade, disrupt formal production, and weaken “Ethiopia Tamrit” (Let Ethiopia Produce), the national manufacturing initiative.

Global and domestic pressures have raised costs, but the city has provided cheaper alternatives. City officials, such as Habiba Siraj, head of the Addis Abeba Trade Bureau, defend retail prices at commercial bakeries as “reasonable,” attributing this to subsidised bread schemes meant to protect low-income consumers.

“Even though coverage gaps exist, viable alternatives have been established across the capital,” said Habiba.

For many consumers, the subsidies provide relief but not a full answer. Distribution depends on timing, location and availability, while families with children or workers who need bread early in the day cannot always wait for subsidised supply. Coverage gaps leave households such as Helen’s exposed to commercial prices, while bakeries argue that administrative controls cannot offset rising costs of flour, fuel and taxes.

The national bread market revenue is estimated at 3.29 billion dollars in 2025. Addis Abeba’s bread market, a daily lifeline for millions, has a network of 379 bakeries that receive 102,000Qtl of wheat flour a month, and 1,334 outlets that meet only 61.2pc of demand.

Production is clearer for one dominant player than for the market as a whole. Sheger Bread Factory has a stated capacity of 1.8 million to two million loaves a day, dispatching 70Gg loaves through an early-morning logistics network to distribution centres across districts. The bread retails for five Birr.

The city also supports 26 bakeries, subsidising bread at 1.20 Br to 1.50 Br for every 100Gm to keep prices stable. These outlets, along with the Birhan Bread initiative, sell 70Gm loaves for eight Birr.

For households already living on the edge, the distinction between subsidised and commercial bread is not merely technical. It decides whether breakfast remains a daily routine or becomes another negotiation over scarcity.

According to Teka Gebreyesus (PhD), graduate of PhD in Economics from Peking University, China and the former state minister of Trade & Industry, treating inflation only as a consumer-price issue misses the production realities behind it. He sees supply and demand as symptoms of deeper gaps in logistics infrastructure, fragmented supply chains and speculative hoarding. He argued that the state should work with manufacturers to map production costs against logistics margins, rather than rely on reactive administrative policing.

He also warns against treating public-sector wage increases as true cost-of-living adjustments.

“Adding cash to a supply-constrained market without fixing infrastructure risks a wage-price spiral that further weakens household purchasing power,” he told Fortune.

That is the macroeconomic version of Helen’s daily problem. Each morning, she buys five small loaves and measures what remains for everything else. For her son, bread is still food. For his mother, it has become a chronicle of wages, fuel, flour, taxes and the limits of endurance.


PUBLISHED ON May 23,2026 [ VOL 27 , NO 1360]