Finding salad ingredients is getting to be a pretty sticky wicket in the U.K. these days. As if those folks didn’t have enough trouble trying to stay warm and keeping the lights on, now the shelves are bare at the local Aldi?

…The UK’s largest supermarket, Tesco, and discounter Aldi have said they are putting limits of three per customer on sales of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers.

Asda has capped sales of lettuces, salad bags, broccoli, cauliflowers and raspberry punnets to three per customer, along with tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers.

And Morrisons has set limits of two on cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuces and peppers.

Tomatoes and peppers seem to be the worst affected but it’s unclear whether this is simply because they are popular.

There seems to be a bit of disagreement about what is fueling the shortages, but the insane fuel and energy prices the Brits have been forced to pay since Ukraine lit off are definitely a huge factor. Besides counting on imports from places like Morocco to supplement supplies, the U.K. normally has a pretty robust winter agriculture industry of its own. Thanks to utility rates, the growing season took a serious hit.

Philip Pearson is the development director at APS, the company started by his grandfather and responsible for growing just under a third of all the tomatoes grown in the U.K. He says growers told the government someone needed to get a handle on costs, or things were going to go badly.

…“We did say, as an industry, last year: ‘If you don’t support us through the winter you will have empty shelves,’” Pearson says. “Government didn’t listen, our customers didn’t listen, nobody listened.

“I don’t want to sound ‘I told you so,’ as that doesn’t help anybody, but we are where we were worried we would end up.”

The combination of soaring energy bills to provide artificial light to help the plants grow, especially during the winter, combined with associated surges in the price of fertiliser and the cost of packaging prompted many British producers and their European counterparts to take the decision to plant fewer crops this winter.

APS chose to leave about 8% of the glasshouses across its 70-hectare estate empty for the first time since the family-owned business was founded by Philip’s grandfather Albert Pearson, who started off with a single nursery in Alderley Edge, Cheshire, in 1949.

The company decided it could not afford to run the LED lights in its glasshouses required to grow a winter tomato crop, which is traditionally sown in August and harvested from Christmas until July.

I mean, good grief – this is one expensive cuke. I’ll bet growers are gasping for air.

…Stiles said growers’ soaring energy costs were a big part of the problem. Producing a single cucumber used to cost 25 pence ($0.30), Stiles said, but that has now hit £1 ($1.20) after natural gas prices shot up when Russia invaded Ukraine exactly a year ago.

There are also still some varying forms of Brexit fall-out involved, although the impact is hotly debated.

…Brexit has also added cost to operations, predominantly through the additional cost of employing seasonal workers. In 2022, companies were required to pay workers coming to the UK on the post-Brexit seasonal worker scheme from overseas an additional 60p an hour on top of the government’s national minimum wage, a decision which Pearson said cost the company “millions” more.

However, the farming minister, Mark Spencer, informed delegates at the NFU on Tuesday that this year growers would only be required to pay workers the national minimum wage.

The length of stay permitted for workers on the post-Brexit seasonal scheme has also proved challenging for tomato businesses with a nine-month season, during which time they require an additional 1,250 people on top of about 750 full-time employees.

Under post-Brexit visa rules, seasonal workers are only allowed to stay for six months at a time, meaning two cohorts of staff are required.

“What that means to us is I now have to train everybody twice. I have to use my best people to train the new people, so my productivity at the peak of the season is really struggling,” Pearson said, adding this was true for the whole industry.

The author of this tweet says his “77 hours” was an exaggeration meant to contrast how much easier it was to take tomatoes from the Netherlands to Poland vice England.

That’s a reference to the increased paperwork to come across the border, the bulk of which hasn’t even been fully implemented yet.

…Although full UK border checks on fruit and vegetable imports from the Europen Union start only from January 2024, Stiles says additional paperwork has already deterred EU producers from exporting more to the country.

That’s in addition to other pending, unpleasant Brexit-related complications on the horizon.

…And Stiles suggested that disruption could continue beyond the spring, citing a Brexit-related lack of workers.

“It is too late for growers to plant for the [summer-fall] season. The workers are not here, it will take 30 days to order the plants and another 12 weeks to start picking,” he said, adding that Brexit “has restricted” the number of migrant workers.

None of this is easily alleviated and it’s hugely painful to an already beaten-up British shopper.

…In the four weeks to January 22, food price inflation hit 16.7%, according to Kantar. That’s its highest level since the data company started tracking the indicator in 2008.

And a quarter of adults said they could not find a replacement for missing food items in stores over the past two weeks, according to the Office for National Statistics. That’s up from 15% the same time last year.

The problem for a government in the digital age is when they’re trying to tell their citizens various reasons why things are the way they are – weather, frost in Morocco, etc, everybody’s short of tomatoes – and people 22 miles across the Channel send lots of pictures showing the shelves at their Lidl full of…tomatoes.

Just to lay this tomato ‘debate’ to bed, this is my local Lidl today. No shortage of Moroccan and French tomatoes and cucumbers..
1/2 pic.twitter.com/uteRBoF7ht

— Andy (@Andy_sMyName) February 22, 2023

It would tend to make a person who simply wants a salad or BLT – but is limited to 2 maters at the store, or can’t find any at all – kinda crazy and maybe a little skeptical of the excuses.

Keep in mind, too – whilst the Netherlands is smirking through the International War of Tomatoes now, with the war they’re waging against their own farmers, those smirks should freeze solid.

Probably a lucky thing for U.K. politicians even rotten tomatoes are too precious to throw at the moment.

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