In the US, a rule of thumb for restaurant economics is that only about 25-35% of an item's price is the cost of ingredients, when you average over all menu items (of course some items better margins than others). The rest goes into labor, fixed costs, etc. It varies a bit by region and by market segment (e.g. fast food vs fast casual vs fine dining), but not by too much.
They’ve been driving people to use their app for years now. The menu prices isn’t what one pays if they use the app, since it has a constant stream of coupons and discounts that bring the list price down.
This is a massive missed opportunity for financialization. We need a 3x Leveraged Bull Potato ETF immediately. Tokenize the crop, lock it in a vault and trade futures against the harvest. Why feed people for free when we could create artificial scarcity and pump the price 10x by next week?
McDonald’s fries pricing suggests the market has already priced in a massive supply squeeze. They are generating better margins on a sliced potato than the Central Banks get when they print fiat.
I know it's fashionable to blame capitalism on everything, but dealing with excess produce is legitimately a hard problem because they have a shelf life and someone has to harvest them and move them to where consumers are.
Not to mention it's factored into future prices. Futures for the same commodity, but for delivery on different dates can vary wildly in price. The most notable examples are oil and electricity prices going negative occasionally.
With advanced preservation techniques, we can extend the shelf life of food almost indefinitely. This flexibility extends to the farm level as well: farmers have the agility to pivot production annually, switching from low-demand crops like potatoes to more profitable alternatives as the market dictates.
> “There were pictures of huge mountains of ‘earth apples’,” she recalled, using the word Erdäpfel, an affectionate term for the potato sometimes used by Berliners
Fun fact: the Hebrew translation of potato, תפוח אדמה, is the portmanteau of "earth" (אדמה) and "apple" (תפוח).
If you should ever be so fortunate as to have too many potatoes, see if you can shred them with a food processor and combine with onion, egg, salt, and pepper to make potato kugel, which freezes exceptionally well.
I suppose this "earth apple" formulation coming up in several languages is partly because potatoes are from the New World, and Old World languages won't have a "traditional" word for them. Whereas in English it's basically a loanword.
Potatoes originated from the Americas, so I suppose that word was created in the past 500 years. But even for modern computer names, I would thing old languages would just use amalgamations like that.
Wiktionary says it was in Old High German a thousand years ago, but defines that word as "pumpkin, squash, melon", which is strange since pumpkins are New World too.
Crops are a commodity where you can't instantly ramp up or down the supply to meet demand. Most require the better part of a year from seed to harvest. If it grows on trees, it can take years before they produce.
Forecasting crop output can also be tricky. Weather conditions, pests, or other things can lead to failed crops or bumper crops.
The life of a farmer can literally and figuratively be 'feast or famine'.
My grandfather was a farmer in the 70s-80s, and he used futures on about 50% of his crop every year. Just enough to make sure a bad year can't wipe out the farm.
This is why nations tend to have things like large stores of long lasting foods, and do things like crop insurance, so that they actually have farmers after a bad year to feed their people.
It is a very risky profession and unless you want to depend on other nations for your continued survival is absolutely needed.
Chop into fries, wash, quick boil 3 minutes, rinse with cold water, dry ( salad spinner works well). Fry in beef tallow and never use veg oil. Remove when crispy and place in drip basket. Season
And not letting farms go bust is not the worst idea. Crops are not like industrial products, how much gets produced has a significant random component. Relying on market forces alone does not appear to be the best solution in this field, no?
That's independent of how much big agro-businesses benefitting from policies they asked politicians to create for them is a problem too.
Anyway -
my recommendation for potatoes is "Kartoffelpuffer"! Can be combined with a large number of things, applesauce is the most simple and laziest choice.
This is very easy to make, the only problem is that you may end up with a lot of oil splashes around your pan. I cover everything around the pan with kitchen paper towels, carefully leaving a few millimeters of space around the heating circle, so that afterwards all I have to do is collect them at the end, no other cleanup necessary.
They need to be as brown as shown at the beginning of the above video for best taste, and not too thick.
They do it all manually in the video, but I just use a mixer, which is much faster and the resulting texture is more to my liking anyway compared to having solid stripes of potato in there. It is also the more common method. Do it like in the video if you prefer them made out of small solid stripes.
Food abundance is crazy to have. Preservation techniques are incredible right now as well. They're no match for a fresh fruit, but if I can get thawed grapes through the year without seasons having significance I'll take them. I am constantly impressed by these seemingly mundane improvements to our lives over the years that have advanced science and development behind them.
Surprisingly (for people who never lived in USSR/Russia :) Belarus and Russia have very tight supply of potatoes (after outright shortages in 2025) with Russia importing Chinese potatoes.
All I want to know is if they are the floury kind or the waxy kind, or some in between hybrid. Floury potatoes are so hard to find these days. Almost everyone is growing these "allrounder" hybrids that cannot really be fried or roasted. I imagine these are also some kind of in between hybrid.
In my super market we usually have three kinds of potatos: festkochend (probably what you mean with waxy), vorwiegend festkochend (somewhere in between), weichkochend (maybe what you mean with floury, they fall appart easily)
Fun facts from Germany:
- Fresh Aldi potatoes are like 0.5 Euro per 1 Kilogram - basically the same price as 25 years ago when Euro currency was introduced
- Our national TV channel now shows a great collection of "potato recipes" videos on demand on its main page
- Price of McDonalds/BurgerKing fries is around 4 Euro, and 5-6 Euro as a street food
- Crisps like Pringles are like 15 Euro per 1 Kilogram (a typical 2.50 Euro for 175gm pack)
Small fries at McD had been lately around 2,99 EUR, that was very expensive given that the "small fries" are actually really small :-D
In the US, a rule of thumb for restaurant economics is that only about 25-35% of an item's price is the cost of ingredients, when you average over all menu items (of course some items better margins than others). The rest goes into labor, fixed costs, etc. It varies a bit by region and by market segment (e.g. fast food vs fast casual vs fine dining), but not by too much.
They’ve been driving people to use their app for years now. The menu prices isn’t what one pays if they use the app, since it has a constant stream of coupons and discounts that bring the list price down.
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Japan: McFry S Size ¥ 200~ (1.09 EUR) M Size ¥ 330~ (1.80 EUR) L Size ¥ 380~ (2.07 EUR) * Prices may differ at selected restaurants and for delivery.
Most of it is probably labor, marketing & franchise fees, rent, utilities, and equipment depreciation. Raw ingredients are likely 5-10%.
This is a massive missed opportunity for financialization. We need a 3x Leveraged Bull Potato ETF immediately. Tokenize the crop, lock it in a vault and trade futures against the harvest. Why feed people for free when we could create artificial scarcity and pump the price 10x by next week?
McDonald’s fries pricing suggests the market has already priced in a massive supply squeeze. They are generating better margins on a sliced potato than the Central Banks get when they print fiat.
Crop futures are already a thing. Potatoes are traded on EEX for example: https://www.eex.com/en/markets/agriculturals/potatoes
Duh. Just set up a viral potato coin and then short it to death
I know it's fashionable to blame capitalism on everything, but dealing with excess produce is legitimately a hard problem because they have a shelf life and someone has to harvest them and move them to where consumers are.
Not to mention it's factored into future prices. Futures for the same commodity, but for delivery on different dates can vary wildly in price. The most notable examples are oil and electricity prices going negative occasionally.
With advanced preservation techniques, we can extend the shelf life of food almost indefinitely. This flexibility extends to the farm level as well: farmers have the agility to pivot production annually, switching from low-demand crops like potatoes to more profitable alternatives as the market dictates.
It really is not fashionable. I will say it is just a matter of observation.
but... will this solution be Cloud Native?
:-D
Leave it to [capitalism|socialism] to organize artificial scarcity..
why does endstage one starts to feel like the other..
The scarcity in socialism is all real! Organic, if you wish.
So this is a legit version of the Polish farmer who was robbed of 150 tons of potatoes after a fake social media post saying they were free?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/viral-free-potatoes-post-cos...
Good to see that not everything is awful all of the time.
> “There were pictures of huge mountains of ‘earth apples’,” she recalled, using the word Erdäpfel, an affectionate term for the potato sometimes used by Berliners
Fun fact: the Hebrew translation of potato, תפוח אדמה, is the portmanteau of "earth" (אדמה) and "apple" (תפוח).
If you should ever be so fortunate as to have too many potatoes, see if you can shred them with a food processor and combine with onion, egg, salt, and pepper to make potato kugel, which freezes exceptionally well.
The French term for potatoes is also ‘earth apple’: pomme de terre
I'm fairly sure that is the origin of Erdäpfel. We certainly thought this was a funny name for potato when we learned French in Scotland :-)
When I learned German the word for potato was Kartoffel.
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I suppose this "earth apple" formulation coming up in several languages is partly because potatoes are from the New World, and Old World languages won't have a "traditional" word for them. Whereas in English it's basically a loanword.
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In Chinese one word for potato is "earth bean" 土豆 (the other word is "horse bell tuber" 马铃薯)
Polish is ziemniaki, where ziemia is earth.
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french fries are pommes frites. the french term is also used in germany (though sometimes shortened to pommes or fritten).
Dutch is aardappel. Fun fact: there's a programming language called Aardappel: https://strlen.com/aardappel-language/
Potatoes originated from the Americas, so I suppose that word was created in the past 500 years. But even for modern computer names, I would thing old languages would just use amalgamations like that.
Checks
Wiktionary says it was in Old High German a thousand years ago, but defines that word as "pumpkin, squash, melon", which is strange since pumpkins are New World too.
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>make potato kugel,
This seems very similar to a hash brown breakfast casserole in the US.
the same in many languages, french pomme de terre, greek geomilo,
Crops are a commodity where you can't instantly ramp up or down the supply to meet demand. Most require the better part of a year from seed to harvest. If it grows on trees, it can take years before they produce.
Forecasting crop output can also be tricky. Weather conditions, pests, or other things can lead to failed crops or bumper crops.
The life of a farmer can literally and figuratively be 'feast or famine'.
My grandfather was a farmer in the 70s-80s, and he used futures on about 50% of his crop every year. Just enough to make sure a bad year can't wipe out the farm.
This is why nations tend to have things like large stores of long lasting foods, and do things like crop insurance, so that they actually have farmers after a bad year to feed their people.
It is a very risky profession and unless you want to depend on other nations for your continued survival is absolutely needed.
But how do they store and preserve that surplus for a longer time cheaply? Probably dehydration helps, but it adds some energy and storing costs.
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Chop into fries, wash, quick boil 3 minutes, rinse with cold water, dry ( salad spinner works well). Fry in beef tallow and never use veg oil. Remove when crispy and place in drip basket. Season
It's good they didn't flood the market and tank the price.
It's real btw. I got a whole wagens worth and distributed amongst my neighbors
Finally a match for "der dümmste Bauer hat die dicksten Kartoffeln". Giving stuff away for free is literally "flooding the market".
> It's good they didn't flood the market and tank the price.
God forbid the price of food ever goes down. That would kill millions.
> God forbid the price of food ever goes down.
They did give it away for free...?
And not letting farms go bust is not the worst idea. Crops are not like industrial products, how much gets produced has a significant random component. Relying on market forces alone does not appear to be the best solution in this field, no?
That's independent of how much big agro-businesses benefitting from policies they asked politicians to create for them is a problem too.
Anyway -
my recommendation for potatoes is "Kartoffelpuffer"! Can be combined with a large number of things, applesauce is the most simple and laziest choice.
https://youtu.be/obs5MhNA4Rs (German Potato Pancakes | Kartoffelpuffer | Reibekuchen Homemade)
This is very easy to make, the only problem is that you may end up with a lot of oil splashes around your pan. I cover everything around the pan with kitchen paper towels, carefully leaving a few millimeters of space around the heating circle, so that afterwards all I have to do is collect them at the end, no other cleanup necessary.
They need to be as brown as shown at the beginning of the above video for best taste, and not too thick.
They do it all manually in the video, but I just use a mixer, which is much faster and the resulting texture is more to my liking anyway compared to having solid stripes of potato in there. It is also the more common method. Do it like in the video if you prefer them made out of small solid stripes.
Your sarcasm is valid, up until you dig past first order effects.
Indeed it would. Below a price level, cultivation would become unprofitable. Hence why subsidies exist
Food abundance is crazy to have. Preservation techniques are incredible right now as well. They're no match for a fresh fruit, but if I can get thawed grapes through the year without seasons having significance I'll take them. I am constantly impressed by these seemingly mundane improvements to our lives over the years that have advanced science and development behind them.
https://archive.ph/ClLpZ
Surprisingly (for people who never lived in USSR/Russia :) Belarus and Russia have very tight supply of potatoes (after outright shortages in 2025) with Russia importing Chinese potatoes.
All I want to know is if they are the floury kind or the waxy kind, or some in between hybrid. Floury potatoes are so hard to find these days. Almost everyone is growing these "allrounder" hybrids that cannot really be fried or roasted. I imagine these are also some kind of in between hybrid.
In my super market we usually have three kinds of potatos: festkochend (probably what you mean with waxy), vorwiegend festkochend (somewhere in between), weichkochend (maybe what you mean with floury, they fall appart easily)
Weichkochend, really? I've only ever seen mehligkochend (floury), but yeah those are widely available in supermarkets.
They were Agria, mehligkochend (not waxy): https://4000-tonnen.de/faq.html
'Maris piper' are very common in the UK that I'd say are floury.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618544
I heard the potato harvest was generally good in Germany. This particular company is rumored to transition to organic farming in the next season.
I think it is great to ensure the product gets used but I also heard that it puts many other potato farmers under price pressure in the area.
Interestingly, some other products are also cheaper today than few months ago:
Basmati rice: -25% (2.5 Euro/Kg)
Pork: -25% (7-8 Euro/Kg)
Butter: -33% (4 Euro/Kg)
Coffee beans: -25% (10-12 Euro/Kg)
Chocolate: -15% (20-30 Euro/Kg)
And then I went to the supermarket today and they wanted like €1.50 for a cucumber. A cucumber! That is essentially crispy water.
The US has a soy glut and a corn glut, and Germany has a potato glut. What to do with all those carbs? Feed cattle?
Cattle, ethanol, vodka. Not sure what else with these numbers.
The US corn industry is lobbying for more ethanol in gasoline. Nobody else can absorb all those carbs near term.
Weird abundance problems. Should we get used to it?
Previously: https://www.4000-tonnen.de/
Gemini 3.0 informs me that the surplus is so large it has overwhelmed the German biofuel industry capacity.
I heard crops now cost more to transport than they are worth. Also, it drives most other prices down e.g. pork is getting cheaper.