I got pissed off that food is expensive in Estonia, so I dug into the numbers. I designed a metric called the Food VAT Burden Index (FVBI) that measures how heavy the tax burden on food is relative to what people actually earn. Estonia ranks second highest in the entire EU.
But the tax burden is only part of the problem. Estonia's market is tiny, which means less selection, higher import costs, and worse quality. Countries with much higher incomes are paying less tax on food, getting better selection, and eating better quality. Estonia is a prime location for overpaying for food on every dimension.
The one thing Estonia has going for it is clean nature — you can raise clean food here. But most of it gets exported because companies make more money selling abroad. We're facing the same problem as Guatemala with coffee: they grow some of the best beans in the world, but you can't get good coffee in Guatemala because all of it gets shipped out. There's no local market for the premium stuff. The raw materials leave, and farmers' lives are made difficult in the process.