A cooking-oil giant says its US market is shrinking — because of who its customers are, not what it sells

Food & Farming 4 min 80 sources

The maker of Mazola oil told investors that immigration raids and financial strain on Latino households are quietly draining a whole commodity market — while a beef shortage, a farm-labour bill, and an egg price-fixing settlement all trace back to the same thing: who is in the food system, and who isn't.

Key takeaways

The maker of Mazola oil says its US market is shrinking because immigration raids and money pressure on Latino households mean fewer customers and more oil-stretching — not because anything about the oil changed.
The same immigration squeeze thins the food system at both ends: fewer buyers on one side, fewer farm workers on the other, which is why a bill to expand the H-2A guest-worker visa landed this week.
Beef stays 12% pricier on a drought-driven supply shock that takes two years to unwind, while an egg price-fixing settlement shows a third way prices rise — sellers agreeing not to compete.

The market that shrank without the product changing

The company that makes Mazola cooking oil told City analysts this week that its US market is shrinking, and it doesn’t expect that to turn around before 2027 [68]. Nothing is wrong with the oil. What changed is the customers.

George Weston, chief executive of Associated British Foods, was blunt about it. “Our heavy use consumer is that Hispanic population who are under financial pressure, who are under pressure from Ice [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and are feeling a bit miserable” [68]. Anti-immigration raids have hit Latino communities hardest, and some shoppers have pulled back or moved online [68]. Households that once bought a bottle of oil are now stretching it — “typically that population will be using oils three times before they throw it out, we think it’s gone to four in many cases,” Weston said [68].

That is a food-system fact hiding inside a business result. A commodity — a raw good like oil or wheat, traded in bulk and priced by how much of it people buy — doesn’t only move when the harvest fails. It moves when the people who buy it change how, or whether, they buy. Frighten or squeeze a group of customers and the market for what they cooked with quietly gets smaller, even though every field, factory, and bottle is exactly as it was. Weston added a second drain on the same market: appetite-suppressing GLP-1 drugs are cutting demand for fried food, and with it, oil [68].

The same squeeze, felt from the other end

The immigration crackdown pushes on the food system from both directions at once. On the buying end, it thins out customers. On the growing end, it thins out workers.

This week the chair of the House Agriculture Committee introduced a bill to expand the H-2A visa programme — the main legal channel for bringing in temporary farm workers — after farmers across the country told him labour was their biggest problem [2]. “A lack of domestic workforce for these jobs, how cumbersome the H-2A visa program was, and the fact that the cost of ag labor was pushing some farmers to the brink of bankruptcy,” he said [2]. The administration’s own immigration raids are what deepened that shortage in the first place [2].

The proposed Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act would let farms hire H-2A workers year-round instead of only seasonally, hand the definition of “agricultural labour” to the Agriculture Secretary, and open a path for existing unauthorised farm workers to enter the programme if they pass background checks [3]. Farm groups have wanted this for years; whether it passes is far from settled [2][3]. The point for the eater is simpler: the hands that pick, pack, and process much of American food are the same population being pressed on the buying side. Move those people and you move the food system at both ends.

South Korea shows one path farms and shops take when labour runs short: this week Reuters reported unstaffed coffee shops and noodle bars spreading across the country, run by robots and self-service and leaning on the honesty of customers, as owners try to escape rising labour costs [66]. That model has quietly grown fourfold since 2020 [66].

Beef stays expensive — for the opposite reason

Not every price is a demand story. US beef prices are up more than 12% on a year ago and set to stay high through the summer [51]. Here the cause is supply, and it runs on a long clock.

A persistent drought burned pasture and drove up the cost of cattle feed, so ranchers slaughtered animals rather than keep them to breed [51]. “Right now, I’m just happy if I can hold on to what I’ve got,” said Brenda Masek, a Nebraska cattle producer [51]. The catch is the timeline: once ranchers decide to rebuild by keeping female calves, it takes at least two years before those animals become beef [51]. So even good rain now doesn’t lower prices soon. Facing a beef shortage, cooks can stretch their dollars with chicken or pork instead, economists said [51]. Coffee, by contrast, may ease — Nestlé signalled it could lower prices as bean costs fall [9].

When the sellers coordinate instead of compete

One more food-price story this week is about neither weather nor customers, but about the sellers agreeing not to fight. Major egg producers will pay $3.3 million and donate 53 million eggs to settle claims that they fixed prices — coordinated to keep supply tight and prices up rather than compete them down [45]. A settlement is not an admission, but the shape of the allegation is the oldest one in commodities: when a handful of producers control most of a market, the cheapest way to raise the price is to quietly agree not to undercut each other.

Underneath all four stories is the same quiet truth. A food market is not really a thing on a shelf — it is the people around it, buying, growing, and pricing. Change who they are or what pressure they’re under, and the market changes, even when the food never did.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

A market is not a thing on a shelf — it's the people standing around it

A price can fall not because the harvest failed or the product got worse, but because the people who bought it stopped showing up — and a market can never be stronger than the crowd it depends on.

The oil didn’t change

A company that makes cooking oil told its investors the market was shrinking, and it didn’t expect it to recover for at least a year. That is the kind of sentence you’d expect to follow a bad harvest, a spoilage scandal, a cheaper rival. None of that happened. The oil is the same oil. The bottles are the same bottles. Every field of soybeans and every press in every factory is exactly where it was last year.

What moved was the customers. A large share of the buyers were households now living under two pressures at once — less money, and the fear of immigration raids. Frightened people stay home. Squeezed people make a bottle last. Some of them started using the same oil four times instead of three before throwing it out. Multiply that small private decision across millions of kitchens and a whole commodity market bends.

We call it a “market” as if it were a place

The word hides the mechanism. We say “the coffee market” or “the beef market” and picture the thing — the beans, the meat, the shelf. But a market is not the object. It is the sum of the people who want the object, at the prices they’ll pay, in the amounts they’ll buy. The object just sits there. The market is a headcount and a mood.

This matters because it changes where you look when a price moves. If you think a market is a thing, you go hunting for a fact about the thing: Did the crop fail? Was there a recall? But half the time the answer isn’t in the object at all. It’s in the people. Who can afford it this year? Who’s scared to go to the store? Who just started a drug that killed their appetite for fried food? Each of those is invisible if you only stare at the shelf.

The same crowd is standing on both sides

Here is where the pattern widens past the till. The households pulling back from the cooking-oil aisle are, in large part, drawn from the same population that picks, packs, and processes much of the country’s food. Press on those people and you don’t move one market — you move the food system from both ends at once. Fewer buyers on the demand side. Fewer workers on the supply side. The bottle gets cheaper to sell and harder to fill, for the same underlying reason.

That is why a bill to bring in more guest farm workers landed the same week a cooking-oil executive complained about lost customers. They are not two stories. They are one crowd, seen from two windows. The person who might have bought the oil and the person who might have harvested the soybean can be the same kind of person, under the same pressure. Treat them as separate problems and you’ll fix neither.

Not every price is a people story — but every price is a person’s story

To be fair to the shelf: sometimes the object really is the cause. Beef is expensive right now because drought burned the pasture, ranchers slaughtered their herds, and rebuilding a herd takes two years no matter how much it rains tomorrow. That is a genuine supply fact, sitting in the object, ticking on a slow clock.

But even then, notice who ends up holding it. The rancher who says she’s just happy to hold on to what she’s got. The cook who quietly switches to chicken. A price is never only a number about a good — it is always also a fact about which people just changed what they do. The drought is real; the market is still the crowd deciding how to live with it.

The crowd can also agree to lie

There’s a darker version of “the market is people.” If a market is really a handful of large producers, those people can stop competing and start coordinating — quietly agreeing to keep supply tight so the price stays up. That is what a fresh egg price-fixing settlement is about: not a shortage, not a mood, but a small group of sellers deciding, together, what the rest of us would pay. When you remember a market is people, this stops being surprising. A price set by a crowd is only as honest as the crowd. Thin the crowd to a few, and the few can write the number.

What the shelf can’t tell you

So the next time a food gets cheaper or dearer, resist the first instinct to ask what happened to the food. Ask who changed. Who left the market, and why. Who couldn’t afford to stay. Who was too afraid to come. Who agreed with whom, out of sight. The object on the shelf will never tell you — it just sits there, priced by a crowd it cannot see and does not control.

And that includes you. You are not watching the market from above; you are one of the people in it, and your own small choices — the bottle you stretch, the cut you skip, the store you avoid — are, in aggregate, exactly the force that moves the number you’re trying to read. None of us can see the whole crowd we’re standing in. We can only remember that it’s a crowd, and hold our conclusions about “the market” a little more loosely for it.

03 · Lab · your turn

Read the Price

Diagnose five real food-price moves by deciding whether the thing changed or the people did, and feel how often the answer is the crowd, not the shelf.

04 · Hope · carry this

If a market is really just people, it can be mended the way people are. The same crowd that felt squeezed this year is the same crowd that, seen clearly, can be helped — and food systems have always bent back toward the folk who grow and buy from them.