For Senayit Bekele, the day's rhythm begins at a vegetable stall. The lunchtime crowd spills through the narrow corridors of Sengatera Building, in Addis Abeba's commercial district, between clothing stalls and street vendors.

The 34-year-old sales assistant has slipped out from the boutique where she folds stacked shirts to run a single errand. What should have been a brief break turns into a familiar calculation, a kilogram of onions in one hand, her monthly budget in the other. She earns 17,000 Br a month and supports herself and two younger siblings. Onions, once a reliable bulk purchase at the start of each month, are no longer predictable in price or quality.

"I just spent 120 Br for a kilogram of onions," she said. "Only two months ago, that same amount of money would have bought me two or three kilos. The prices are spinning out of control."

Price is only half of the problem. "Worse yet, the onion she bought was not the dry type that can be stored in bulk for the month.

"It is damp, poor quality, and has already started rotting from the inside. You pay double the price for food that goes bad before you can even cook it."

Rising prices, alongside falling quality, now define the market across the capital. Families buy smaller quantities more often, stretching limited incomes further, and one of the few coping tools left to low- and middle-income households has eroded. For many buyers, thrift itself has become expensive.

Cheaper onions mean higher waste; better ones demand more upfront, pressing budgets already stretched across rent, transport and schooling. The rising cost of vegetables, paired with faster spoilage, has hollowed out the calculation households once relied on.

The same dilemma shapes Tsion Temesgen's week. A 41-year-old mother of three managing a household of five, she no longer shops based on price alone but on durability, judging onions by how long they might last in her kitchen.

"I ended up buying onions for 160 Br," she said, lifting firm bulbs from her basket. "It felt like the only reasonable choice left. When I looked at the 120 Br onions, they were damp, bruised, and already rotting. If I bought those, half would end up in the rubbish by tomorrow morning."

The pressure extends beyond the household, into the city's food businesses. At Liyu Restaurant, near Ras Abebe Aregay St., at Mesqel Square, lunch runs at full pace. Behind stacks of invoices, Tirhas Bezabih reviews recent purchase records. Seasonal swings are expected in her trade, but this year the shift has cut deeper.

"We usually expect prices to increase around this time of year," she told Fortune.

Inflation has returned to one of the most politically sensitive corners of the economy, the food basket. Yet this time, the pressure appears not to be coming mainly from bread and cereals, the traditional bellwether of household stress. It is showing up at the vegetable stall, where prices are galloping by 12.3pc year-on-year (YoY) in May this year, according to the Ethiopian Statistical Service (ESS). They have become one of the most important forces behind the renewed climb in food inflation, not because they are the fastest-rising item but because they sit near the centre of the consumption basket.

That climb carried food and non-alcoholic beverages inflation to 15pc in May, overtaking both headline inflation, at 13.4pc, and non-food inflation, at 11.1pc, a striking reversal from a year earlier, when food inflation of 12.1pc sat well below non-food inflation of 17.8pc. With food now running 3.9 percentage points above non-food prices, the shift is felt less as a statistic than as the daily choice of the kitchen, where tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, potatoes and onions determine what goes into a stew, accompany injera, and how far a wage packet stretches before the next pay day.

For business owners in the food market like Tirhas, the jump from then to now has been massive, leaving restaurants with few options. Raising menu prices risks losing customers whose purchasing power has already been eroded by food inflation; holding prices steady cuts into profits.

A few streets away, on Tesema Aba Kemaw Street, Dasene Restaurant has weathered changing conditions for nearly 15 years. For its Manager, Akalework Semie, earlier shortages rarely stopped businesses from finding quality produce, provided they were willing to pay.

"It's no longer simply about budgeting for higher prices," he said. "Even if you're willing to pay more, the good onions are simply not available."

Sorting through damp stock adds labour and waste, and spoilage now translates directly into loss.

"The quality has disappeared," he said. "Money alone can't solve the problem."

Vegetables have become the second-largest listed food component in the CPI table after bread and cereals, which carry a 17.1pc weight. While cereal prices jumped by a comparatively modest 6.7pc, vegetables climbed almost twice as fast. They alone contributed roughly 1.5 percentage points to the headline rate, more than the 1.1 points from bread and cereals despite the larger cereal weight. That is why the pressure is harder to dismiss as a narrow shock, since vegetable prices absorb many forces at once, from transport costs, fuel and fertiliser to seasonal supply, market access, insecurity along trade routes, urban demand and the margins taken at each stage between farm-gate and retail stall.

For Dawit Teshale of the Ethiopian Economics Association, the problem lies in supply, not demand.

"It's never been the absence of buyers," he said. "The problem is getting enough produce to the market."

He attributed disruptions in logistics and transport to insecurity, input costs, and the natural limits of farming.

"A factory can increase production by running another shift," he said. "Agriculture doesn't work that way."

Food prices increased by 1.3pc in May from the previous month, with vegetables up by 1.2pc, close to the overall food increase, even if slower than fish and seafood, non-alcoholic beverages, coffee, other food products and meat. Among the year-on-year readings tracked by the ESS, non-alcoholic beverages and coffee surged by 40.9pc, the sharpest increase. Yet vegetables stand apart because they combine weight, purchase frequency, and social sensitivity, affecting both poor and middle-income households.

Economists observed that the latest market pressure is more diffuse, spreading across vegetables, proteins, dairy, oils, beverages, and processed foods. Inflation has moved back into the market basket, and in May the vegetable stall was one of the places where the squeeze was most clearly visible.

The breakdown begins long before produce reaches city kitchens. On a cloudy Wednesday afternoon in Haile Garment, one of the capital's main fruit and vegetable trading hubs, activity has slowed. Sacks of onions sit stacked, many damp and discoloured, as buyers inspect each bulb before purchase. After eight years in the trade, Tamrat Bekele saw that volatility had become the norm. Only weeks earlier, onion prices reached 170 Br a kilogram before falling to 100 and 110 Br, a drop that offered little comparative stability.

"I don't have one permanent farm supplying me," he said. "I buy wherever onions are available, whether from Amhara Regional State or elsewhere."

Transporters face mounting fuel costs while freight charges shift almost daily. Hauling vegetables from distant production areas in Benishangul-Gumuz Regional State can cost as much as 340,000 Br a truck.