Food shortages, empty shelves and shoppers fighting over everything from toilet roll to tomatoes – it’s something we’ve seen more frequently than we would like in recent years.
Climate change, protesting farmers and an uncertain geopolitical landscape have all led to increasing concerns about the stability of our food supply chain. Some worry that gaps on our supermarket shelves are likely to become increasingly common.
Just a few weeks ago, The Independent described the current situation as a “Great British food shortage”. Butter, it said, was ”vanishing”, with food becoming ”a luxury rather than a given”, adding that “supermarkets are struggling to stock even basic greens”.
Adding a healthy dose of drama to proceedings, it concluded that the UK’s food supply was ”in crisis”.
But while there is some veracity to the claim that food security is becoming more perilous, and it’s clear that prices are indeed rising, shelves are not yet bare. And for The Independent to say they are in danger of becoming so is nothing short of scaremongering.
The Grocer was so sure of this that we decided to investigate the claims in more detail, crunching the numbers on some of the core lines bought by British consumers every week. And the data showed that the UK is in no imminent danger of running out of food – of the 20 items analysed only two were less available than they were a year ago. The vast majority, in fact, were significantly more available.
Food, farmers and inflation
Our research showed that the claim that supermarkets are struggling to stock greens was entirely unfounded. In fact, there was more broccoli and cauliflower on the shelves than last year. Across the traditional big four, Lidl, Aldi and Waitrose, all supermarkets had at least one line available of broccoli, if not several, and in cauliflowers, only six SKUs were missing.
Even crops grown abroad are better stocked, with oranges and bananas 10% and 37.5% (respectively) more available than they were a year ago.
It is a similar picture in dairy. Prices are on the rise, as reported in The Grocer, due to an increase in global demand for milk, but supply on shelf has stayed pretty steady so far with 23.4% out of stock, compared with 39.4% last year. The current gaps are mostly flavoured or limited-edition speciality products, rather than basket basics.
And cheddar – which will likely see the impact of milk supply issues in the coming months – is doing similarly well, with 31.3% more lines on shelves this year than last.
The issue of milk supply is not going anywhere, but in times of crisis, the food industry has stepped up to the challenge.
It’s a similar story with egg farming. A couple of years ago, supply was at rock bottom when a lack of adequate returns from retailers drove free-range egg producers to stop producing. Work was done across the industry to improve pay to suppliers and boost confidence in the sector, and now out-of-stocks are down by 30.5% compared with last year.
Just two years ago, cucumbers, lettuces and tomatoes were all in short supply after bad weather hit Europe and northern Africa. Moves were made by retailers to bolster their supply chains and now, even compared with this time last year, which was more stable, availability is significantly higher across the board.
(Supply) chain reaction
That is not to say that retailers can be ready for everything, of course, as some things are simply much harder to prepare for. Last summer, cucumbers flew off the shelves due to a TikTok trend that showed a variety of recipes for eating an entire cucumber in one sitting. No amount of forecasting would ever have predicted that.
Now, the only products looking slightly worse for wear are sugar, which had one line out of stock this time last year and now has two, and cooking chocolate, which last year had 10 gaps and this year has 12. Neither of these are anything to be overly concerned about.
We are facing down the barrel of some pretty big issues. Climate change is going to wreak havoc on our food supply chain and if the farmers are right about IHT we could see the UK’s farmland shrink drastically over the next seven years. However, scaremongering around what that future looks like is not helpful.
Rather than decrying what could be, work needs to be done to protect our supply, and that work is happening.
Small gaps on shelves are inevitable. Supply chains are long and complex and retailers cannot foresee every issue (or every TikTok trend). But generally supermarkets are making sure consumers are being fed today and tomorrow, and will continue to be fed for many years to come.
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