UK retailers lose £18m in sales due to out-of-stock cooking oils

British retailers have lost out on £18m in sales due to the limited availability of cooking oils amid the Ukraine conflict, according to new data.

According to research conducted by NielsenIQ, 4% of all fmcg products have been out of stock for four days since the beginning of 2022 – triggered by commodity price increases, rising energy costs and the impact of the war in Ukraine.

Cooking oils, however, was “one of the categories most significantly impacted with out of stocks”, with availability dropping as low as 78% in the UK last month.

NielsenIQ data for the 20 weeks until 22 May 2022 revealed lost sales of cooking oils amounted to £18m across UK retailers.

The disrupted service has also hammered sales in Spain and France, where availability dropped to 75%, the data shows.

Dan Sutton, analytics manager for retail collaborative sales at NielsenIQ, said in addition to “significant” sales lost, out of stocks resulted in “reduced customer satisfaction and lower loyalty levels”.

“Our research shows that 30% of shoppers will visit a new store when they can’t find what they’re looking for, and 70% will buy a different brand when their regular choice is out of stock,” Sutton said.

It comes after rapeseed oil prices have increased by up to 100% in the mults, and many supermarkets have introduced rations on the number of cooking oil bottles customers can buy in order to manage limited stocks.

Filippo Berio MD Walter Zanre, however, claimed the brand had seen “a small uplift in olive oil sales as shoppers had turned to mild and light olive oil as an alternative” for sunflower and rapeseed. 

KTC Edibles CCO Gary Lewis told The Grocer he predicted the climate would improve for rapeseed and sunflower oils “once we get past July”.

“The good news is in August we’ll get the arrival of the EU crop and the UK crop [of rapeseed oil],” he said, adding “sunflower availability looks like it will improve in a couple of months’ time”.

“We are actually seeing quite a few exports coming out of Ukraine through truck and rail, so availability has increased, but the prices are still too high for the market to move to.”

If availability continued to improve “we could see a situation by October, that sunflower becomes easily more available and actually becomes more price competitive”, said Lewis.