Eggs are expensive and Easter is quickly approaching. So, let's decorate potatoes 🥔
It’s not clear yet how the Easter Bunny will feel about this, but the Easter basket in some households this year could feature nicely decorated potatoes instead of eggs.
Plenty of videos have popped up recently on social media explaining why people are swapping out eggs and swapping in potatoes, and providing how-to tips on clever ways to decorate the starchy vegetable.
This is when food inflation meets ingenuity.
One Instagram user, hellowonderful_co, posted a video showing how to make an Easter-themed potato stamp, adding:
“Eggs are too pricey this year try painting potatoes instead! 🥔😆
P.S. Anyone else experiencing anxiety over rising prices and inflation 😬"
Ever dye a potato a cool shade of red or green or purple for Easter? TikTok and Facebook Reels have you covered on this task, too.
The potato industry has taken note of the sentiment about dumping pricey eggs and embracing Easter potatoes.
“We’ve been promoting dye
ing potatoes for three years now and we are excited to see so much buzz already about this trend on social media,” Kayla Vogel, senior global marketing manager with Potatoes USA (a trade group for potato growers and importers), told Bagable.com.
“We always see an increase in sales of potatoes in grocery stores around Easter time. So we wanted to offer an additional activity that parents could do with their kids with potatoes when they already have more potatoes at home,” she said.
The other incentive is that decorating potatoes will save families more money than decorating real eggs this year.
Consumers for months have struggled with higher prices, shortages of eggs and store limits set on how many cartons of eggs shoppers could buy in a single trip to the grocery store.
Store prices for a dozen eggs hit nearly $6, or a 10-year high, in February, according to government data. Elevated egg prices, more recently, have come down to about $3 for a dozen eggs as supply has picked up and shortages ease.
“With grocery bills a little bit tighter, we also wanted to offer additional activities where families can incorporate potatoes outside of just eating them because potatoes still remain an affordable vegetable for consumers to buy.”
Some suggestions to try with Easter potatoes: Use edible dye and other safe-for-consumption materials so that the artwork can be enjoyed as a treat once the artwork is complete, Vogel said.
Separately, PAAS, which has produced Easter Egg dye kits in the US for more than 140 years, surveyed over 9,000 consumers (ages 18 and over) in January about their purchase intentions for Easter-related products, such as eggs and dyes.
While the survey results showed 94% of consumers who celebrate Easter still plan to dye eggs this year, a majority of them said they would dye fewer eggs than versus previous years because of higher egg prices.
Respondents also offered up other alternatives to dyeing Easter eggs this year, which included marshmallows and pasta.