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People pay more for ‘zongzi’ this year: vendors

Participants in a zongzi eating competition at a department store in Ilan yesterday stuff themselves. Contestants had to eat five zongzi in the shortest time to win gift vouchers worth NT$1,000. The winner managed the feat in five minutes and 50 seconds. PHOTO: KUO YEN-HUI, TAIPEI TIMES

If you didn’t buy any zongzi (粽子) for Dragon Boat Festival yesterday, you may not have noticed, but this traditional treat of glutinous rice stuffed with meat, mushrooms and other goodies wrapped with bamboo leaves has become the latest foodstuff to become more expensive with increases in commodity prices.

At the 55-year-old Ningpo Tsai Wan Shing (寧波蔡萬興) restaurant on Fuzhou Street in Taipei, store manager Lily Lu (陸麗莉) said zongzi prices had increased by NT$5 apiece from a year ago.

The NT$5 increase, however, does not cover the rise in costs of ingredients such as pork, rice and soy sauce, not to mention the recent hikes for natural gas, she said.

“In the past, each customer would buy on average between 10 and 20 zongzi as gifts for their family and friends. This year, the figures dropped to three to five as customers just wanted to get a festive feeling without spending too much,” Lu told the Taipei Times.

Zongzi sales for the festival were expected to drop between 10 percent and 20 percent this year from a year ago, Lu said.

People at Ho Hsing (合興), a zongzi vendor at the famous Nanmen Market (南門市場) in downtown Taipei, said pork and natural gas prices have gone up by NT$50 per kilogram and NT$80 per 20kg-cylinder respectively from a year ago. Soy sauce and salted duck’s egg yolks also increased by NT$10 per bottle and NT$5 per egg respectively, they said.

Statistics provided by hypermarket RT Mart (大潤發) showed that the average prices for zongzi ingredients were 30 percent higher this year than last year, with pork seeing the largest hikes after wholesale pork prices surged nearly 50 percent year-on-year to NT$74 per kilogram last week, the highest level in nine years.

Rising fuel and food costs are prompting more customers to seek bargains at hypermarkets and supermarkets. Several local hypermarket and supermarket chains including RT Mart, Carrefour Taiwan (家樂福), Far Eastern Geant Co (愛買) and Wellcome Supermarket (頂好超市) are offering “low-price supply areas” within their stores to attract shoppers.

Rising costs are “eroding customers’ purchasing power,” Henry Yin (尹皓), public relations assistant manager at Far Eastern Geant, said by telephone.

“Many households have found it cheaper to buy zongzi at hypermarkets rather than making their own, which would cost them between NT$25 and NT$35 apiece,” Yin said.

Both Far Eastern Geant and RT Mart found their zongzi sales to be exceptionally strong this year as they managed to offer unbeatable prices of 10 zongzi for NT$99 made by the well-known Liu Family in Shihmen Township (石門鄉), Taipei County.

Far Eastern Geant said these super-cheap zongzi, known as Shihmen Zong (石門粽), are the cheapest among the 30 different zongzi it sold this year, and accounted for 200,000 or 25 percent of the total 800,000 zongzi it sold for the Dragon Boat Festival holiday.

Far Eastern Geant’s sale of zongzi reached NT$10 million this year, up from NT$7 million during the same period last year, Yin said.

RT Mart said its low-cost strategy has also boosted its sale of zongzi this year by 20 percent from a year ago.

But it wasn’t that good at President Chain Store Corp (統一超商), as the largest convenience store chain operator in Taiwan said its pre-order sales of zongzi dropped 10 percent from a year ago, although the retail prices remained the same.

“Consumers are tightening their belts because of the recent rise in commodity prices,” said Lillian Lin (林立莉), public relations manager at President Chain. She also attributed the weak sales to consumers’ tight budget after celebrating Mother’s Day and reporting their income taxes recently.
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