For those meeting planners who thought food and beverage prices were alarmingly high coming into 2026, it’s possible the news could get worse for their business events taking place in the second half of the year.
That’s because the Strait of Hormuz is almost completely closed to shipping due to armed conflict throughout the Persian Gulf region--where nearly half of the world’s plant fertilizers are made.
According to a recent article in the New York Times, “If the waterway remains off limits, prices for key fertilizers will go up. That could prompt farmers to limit their application, reducing the world’s food supply while making sustenance less affordable. ‘It’s bad — there’s no other way of putting it,’ said Chris Lawson, vice president of market intelligence and prices at CRU Group, a research firm focused on commodities. ‘The world is highly reliant on fertilizer and associated raw materials supplied out of that region.’”
As a result, various vegetables and fruits as well as wheat grown this year on the farms that most hotels, resorts and restaurants get their products from could be less available, or those farms could buy different types of fertilizer from other suppliers. Either outcome would cause significantly higher prices for consumers, including meeting groups.
What Planners Can Do
Given that most hotels are reluctant to guarantee group F&B pricing more than six months before an event begins, the F&B estimates in event contracts signed farther out than that could be significantly inaccurate if crop yields are affected by the fertilizer shortage. Planner should look closely at their contracts’ initial F&B price estimates and try to minimize the percentage increase that the host property can impose as the event dates get closer.
Another possible solution: Planners could seek to book events at hotels and resorts that use local organic farms for much of their F&B supply. While this might not lower the cost of F&B, it would bring an interesting element into the meeting to make a lasting impression on attendees.
