Bigas: the one product quietly eating your margin
Rice inflation hit 19.4% in August, the fastest in two years, and rice alone pushed the national rate up by 1.3 points. Here is what a sack costs today, what that makes a kilo, and why most stores are selling rice for almost nothing.
Most owners already know rice is the hardest thing on the shelf to price. What the latest numbers show is how much harder it has become in one year.
Rice is now the single biggest thing pushing prices up
In the August figures the Philippine Statistics Authority released on September 4, overall inflation eased to 6.1%. Rice went the other way.
| Rice inflation | Rate |
|---|---|
| August 2026 | 19.4% |
| July 2026 | 17.1% |
| Last time it was higher | July 2024, at 20.9% |
Rice was the largest single contributor to August inflation, adding 1.3 percentage points to the national rate on its own. Put plainly: without rice, the headline number would have started with a four.
The retail averages tell the same story:
| Survey | Average retail price |
|---|---|
| Well-milled rice, 15 to 17 August 2026 | ₱56.29 per kilo |
| Regular milled rice, 1 to 5 September 2026 | ₱49.96 per kilo |
| Regular milled rice, September 2025 | ₱40.31 per kilo |
That last pair is the one to sit with. Regular milled rice is up about 24% in twelve months. A customer buying two kilos a day is paying roughly ₱19 more per day than last September, or about ₱580 a month, out of a budget that did not grow 24%.
What a sack costs right now
These are the prices on shopsuki.ph, a Philippine online grocery, on the morning of September 18, 2026. They are retail, not wholesale, so your supplier should be below them. The per-kilo figure is the sack price divided by its weight.
| Rice | Sack price | Per kilo |
|---|---|---|
| Banay-Banay well-milled, 5kg | ₱246.00 | ₱49.20 |
| Jasmine RC-160, 25kg | ₱1,225.00 | ₱49.00 |
| Wow Bugas Green Sack, 25kg | ₱1,235.00 | ₱49.40 |
| Master Chef Super Denorado Hasmin, 25kg | ₱1,355.00 | ₱54.20 |
| Farm Boy Sinandomeng, 10kg | ₱779.90 | ₱77.99 |
| Farm Boy Thai Jasmine, 10kg | ₱797.05 | ₱79.71 |
| Doña Maria Jasponica, 5kg | ₱697.60 | ₱139.52 |
Two things worth noticing.
The ordinary rice most tindahan sell is clustered near ₱49 to ₱54 a kilo at retail. That matches the PSA average almost exactly, which is a good sign the numbers are real and not one odd shop.
The spread between plain and premium is enormous. Jasponica is nearly three times the price of a green-sack well-milled. If you carry both, they are not the same product and should never carry the same markup.
The arithmetic nobody does
Take the 25kg sack at the low end. Say your wholesaler gives you the sack at ₱1,150, below the ₱1,225 retail above.
- Cost per kilo: ₱1,150 ÷ 25 = ₱46.00
- Sell at ₱50: you make ₱4.00 a kilo, 8.7%
- Sell at ₱52: you make ₱6.00 a kilo, 13.0%
- Sell at ₱55: you make ₱9.00 a kilo, 19.6%
Now compare that with a sachet of shampoo, where the same peso of capital turns a 25% to 45% margin, and turns it faster.
A full 25kg sack sold at ₱50 a kilo earns you ₱100. That is about the same as selling twelve sachets of coffee. The sack costs eleven hundred pesos of your capital, takes up a corner of the store, and can spoil or get weevils.
This is not an argument to stop selling rice. Rice brings people through the door every single day, and a tindahan without bigas loses the customer for everything else too. It is an argument to know that rice is a traffic product, not a profit product, and to stop letting it quietly set the standard for how thin your other prices can be.
Three things to do this week
1. Weigh your sack. A 25kg sack is very often not 25kg. If yours comes in at 24.2kg, your real cost per kilo is ₱47.52, not ₱46.00, and every kilo you sell is 1.5 pesos thinner than you think. Weigh one sack from each supplier, once. It is the single highest-value ten minutes in this post.
2. Price your premium rice separately. If you carry a jasmine or a Denorado alongside plain well-milled, do not add the same ₱4. The customer who buys Jasponica at ₱140 a kilo is not counting pesos the way the customer buying green-sack is. A 15% markup there is both normal and invisible.
3. Recompute every single time you restock. Rice moved 24% in a year, which means it moved roughly 2% a month, which means a price you set in June is wrong in September. Every other product on your shelf can be repriced twice a year. Rice cannot.
In TindaJuan, set the sack as the pack and the kilos as the pieces, and the item page does the division for you, every time you type a new buy price. If you have not set a sell price, it suggests one and you can accept it with a tap or type your own. The buy list then quotes you sacks, not kilos, so what you carry to the supplier matches what you actually buy.
The short version
- Rice inflation is 19.4%, the fastest since July 2024, and it alone added 1.3 points to the national rate.
- Regular milled rice averages ₱49.96 a kilo, up about 24% from ₱40.31 a year ago.
- Ordinary sacks work out to roughly ₱49 to ₱54 a kilo at retail. Premium rice runs two to three times that.
- At ₱50 a kilo on a ₱46 cost, a whole 25kg sack earns about ₱100. Treat rice as what brings people in, and make your margin elsewhere.
- Weigh the sack. Reprice on every delivery.
Sources. Philippine Statistics Authority August 2026 CPI release and rice inflation figures via Rappler and Inquirer Business, September 2026. PSA price situationer for 1 to 5 September 2026 via SunStar. Sack prices from the public product listings of shopsuki.ph, captured September 18, 2026, and subject to change.