The disruption to the supply of heat-requiring vegetables is that many food chains limit the amount of the important product that can be purchased at one time in the UK. The reason is the cold wave that reached Spain and Morocco, writes the fruchthandel.de portal article.
Customers accepted it with great surprise and concern
They can buy no more than three or even just two tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and their heat-seeking companions in the UK stores of the Tesco, Asda, Aldi and Morrisons chains.
Supply difficulties can be traced back to the fact that a cold snap aggravated by the rains in Spain and Morocco has reached the growing areas, which is compounded by the fact that the stocks were not necessarily optimally supplied with expensive fertilizers, i.e. even in good conditions they could only take smaller quantities. .
Referring to the article in The Telegraph, fruchthandel.de writes that the situation is unlikely to change for some time and may repeat itself in the coming years. The main reason for this is that after a sharp decline in domestic winter cultivation due to expensive heat energy—statistics on this have been kept since 1985, and since then, the current winter has produced the fewest home vegetables—they are at the mercy of outlying growing regions. Justin King, the former chairman of Sainsbury’s, also blames Brexit for the situation.
Some relief is expected at the end of March, at least with regard to tomatoes, which will have a large amount of domestic goods on the shelves by then, experts claim.
According to the British press, it is a UK-specific phenomenon, and there are no similar disturbances in other major vegetable importing countries in Europe. Representatives of German department store chains told Spiegel the same; However, the fruchthandel.de trade portal article adds to all this that even if there are no supply difficulties, the prices certainly show that things are not right (we can feel this in Hungary too). In addition to the “core” inflation, this increase in vegetable prices is no longer certain that customers will be able to afford it, according to the article.
