Price creep

Price creep is the slow, unannounced upward drift of supplier prices — a few percent at a time, spread across months and across line items, on invoices that are otherwise entirely correct. No single increase is large enough to trigger a phone call, which is precisely why it works. It is only visible when you compare the same item's price across a run of invoices, rather than checking each invoice against the one before it. By the time it shows in your margin it has usually been paid for a quarter or more.

Produce prices move for real reasons — season, fuel, weather — so an increase is never obviously wrong. That is the cover it hides under. The question worth asking is not whether a price went up but whether it went up further than the market did, and only your own invoice history answers that.

It compounds quietly across a supplier base. Two percent on a handful of lines at three suppliers is a rounding error on any single invoice and a five-figure number over a year on the volumes a food business actually buys.