UK Tomato Shortage: The Fragile System Behind Cheap Food

In 2022, Britain’s headlines were dominated by the Queen’s passing, Charles’s accession, soaring heating and electricity bills, and a revolving door of prime ministers. Yet, as the year drew to a close, another story captured the public’s attention: the “egg shortage”. For several weeks from November through December, major supermarkets across the UK struggled to keep eggs in stock, leaving shoppers repeatedly confronted with bare shelves.

Well, think of that: a historic Western power unable to secure even its eggs. A touch ironic, wouldn’t you say?

Early in 2023, the UK faced another bout of scarcity, this time turning its attention to vegetables.

From late February onwards, shortages hit tomatoes, green peppers, and cucumbers across major UK supermarkets, with the tomato crisis proving the most severe. By early March, a friend of mine, Mr L, who lives in East London, told me he’d struggled to find tomatoes for weeks. The moment the “tomato crunch” set in, the shelves at local Lidl and Tesco stores went bare, leaving little else in the vegetable aisle to be had.

On 21 February, the *Manchester Evening News* dispatched a reporter to track down tomatoes. After trawling the city’s major supermarkets, he managed to find only a handful of them at Tesco. Writing with wry amusement, he noted that the only green making a showing was rocket—a salad leaf that rarely flies off the shelves anyway.

By the second week of March, tomato supplies began to trickle back, though most major supermarkets introduced purchase limits, capping shoppers at three or five per customer. While some officials suggested the “vegetable crunch” would ease within a few weeks, others painted a gloomier picture: the BBC cited a growers’ association forecasting that the shortfall would persist until May.

●A notice beside the bare shelves reads: “To ensure everyone gets a fair share, there is a limit of three per customer.” Source: Reuters

I. Are vegetables really in such short supply?

In fact, the current vegetable shortage may not quite align with public perception. The bare shelves captured by the media are largely confined to supermarkets, while other supply channels have not experienced stock-outs.

During the first week of March, my Indian friend Prabhu in north London told me that the shortage in the area was primarily in supermarkets, whereas small local greengrocers around residential streets still had tomatoes and other vegetables in stock. Another Londoner, L, also remarked that you could sometimes see several large crates of tomatoes on sale in nearby independent shops. Unlike supermarkets, these are independent, non-chain businesses, frequently run by ethnic minorities such as Iranians, South Asians, West Africans, and Turks.

Tomatoes at these greengrocers come with a noticeably higher price tag than those in supermarkets. Prabhu explained that a punnet of six cherry tomatoes costs 85 pence (roughly 7 yuan) in supermarkets, while the same quantity fetches £1.20 (around 10 yuan) at nearby independent grocers. As the shortage has grown more apparent, these shops have been steadily raising their prices.

● Food journalist Joanna Blythman retweeted a post from a Yorkshire greengrocer, noting that independent shops are not experiencing any shortages.

● On 13 March, tomatoes at an organic shop in London (De Beauvoir Wholefoods, Southgate Rd, Islington) were priced at £4.99 and £6.99 per kilogram (roughly 42 and 59 RMB). Photo: Tingting

Supermarkets are cheaper but running short; independent shops are pricier but fully stocked.

In an early March report, the Manchester Evening News interviewed several independent produce retailers. They all agreed that tomatoes—whether imported or homegrown—would be readily available if prices were simply raised. From their perspective, the cause of the shortage is obvious: supermarkets are unwilling to pay more.

● A tweet from a fruit and vegetable merchant on 2 March: “Supermarket buyers must feel rather embarrassed, watching small independents like us sourcing stock from all over, while their own shelves remain empty.”

II. Producers Squeezed by Supermarket Orders

The reason supermarkets are reluctant to raise prices lies in their long-standing strategy of low-cost procurement. The Manchester Evening News quotes an interviewed vegetable producer who explained that supermarkets have already signed quarterly contracts, with purchase volumes fixed in advance. At such a critical juncture, it is extraordinarily difficult to upend their established pricing models.

Since the 1970s, Britain’s supermarket industry has relied on a procurement model centred on long-term contracts. Leveraging their vast and predictable sales volumes, supermarkets pressure growers into agreeing to lower-priced, long-term supply deals.

This approach has allowed supermarkets to undercut independent grocers on price and capture market share. At the same time, it has severely compressed producers’ profit margins, leaving them acutely sensitive to any fluctuation in costs. When expenses rise, they simply cut back on output rather than operate at a loss.

● The UK supermarket system, typified by Tesco, largely dictates the market price of farm produce.

Cost fluctuations are felt most acutely in energy. British winters are long, and cultivating out-of-season crops such as tomatoes requires greenhouses, which are typically heated with natural gas. Between the war in Ukraine and years of flawed energy policy from the UK government, domestic energy prices have spiralled since 2022. Caught between soaring energy bills and static supermarket purchase prices, many growers have simply quit the industry. The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) states that 10% of producers have exited the sector this year alone.

Recently, a large-scale tomato grower relying on LED technology took to the newspapers to voice their concerns, arguing that the government must treat this sector as critical infrastructure and invest accordingly. Just a few years ago, the Daily Mail was hailing these innovative farming methods, predicting they would substantially increase domestic vegetable yields. Yet today, this capital-intensive, energy-heavy model has become a financial liability.

● Greenhouses cultivating winter tomatoes using LED lighting and gas heating. Image source: oreon-led.com

Supermarkets have rendered the entire food supply system fragile, amplifying even the impact of unpredictable weather. According to figures from the British Retail Consortium, 95% of the tomatoes and 90% of the lettuce consumed in the UK during winter are imported. Most of these tomato imports originate from Spain, alongside other countries in southern Europe and North Africa. This winter, the Mediterranean region was hit by unusually high temperatures, followed by a cold snap in early spring. This volatile weather drastically reduced vegetable yields, indirectly contributing to the shortages seen in the UK.

While some media outlets suggest that post-Brexit customs procedures and border checks, which have delayed vegetable transport and supply, are the primary cause of the shortage, a comparison of supermarket operating models across Europe and the UK reveals a different reality. The fixed-price, long-term orders commonly used by British supermarkets are far from the norm elsewhere in Europe. This structural difference, arguably, is the crucial but often overlooked factor.

III. Vegetable Production Reliant on Cheap Labour

Labour shortages have further compounded the difficulties across the entire production chain.

Prior to Brexit, Britain’s vegetable and fruit industries relied heavily on overseas workers on six-month temporary visas. They undertook the labour-intensive, highly seasonal work of harvesting and crop maintenance. Many of these workers came from Romania, Ukraine and other countries. According to Bloomberg, in 2021, before the war began, 67% of the UK’s 30,000 annual short-term agricultural visas were granted to Ukrainian citizens. As the conflict intensified and it became harder for Ukrainians to leave, finding farm labour grew increasingly difficult. Brexit, meanwhile, raised the barriers for Eastern European workers seeking to enter the UK.

These factors have culminated in the UK’s current labour deficit. A 2022 parliamentary report on agricultural workers noted that, as of August 2021, the UK had 4.1 million jobs across the agricultural sector, yet 500,000 positions remained unfilled—from cultivation and processing to transport and retail. While that year’s staffing crisis did not trigger a shortage of vegetables, it did force producers to cull livestock and destroy other produce before it could reach the market. Even as early as March 2022, when the report was published, MPs were sounding the alarm over reports that winter vegetable acreage and yields were falling due to a lack of workers. Little did they know that within a year, Britain would indeed be grappling with a vegetable shortage.

The UK is not alone; agriculture across Europe relies heavily on migrant workers.

A 2018 report by Oxfam highlighted that Italy’s horticultural sector employs many refugees in desperate need of employment: the industry is rife with “wages paid well below the legal minimum” and “systemic breaches of regulations on working hours”. Hsiao-Hung Pai, a Chinese-British journalist for The Guardian, recently published *Ciao Ousmane*, a work of non-fiction that examines how Italy’s tomato farming industry exploits migrant labour. She writes: “Workers are paid between €3 and €4 for every 300 kg of tomatoes they pick—some 50 per cent below the minimum wage. Shifts routinely last eight to twelve hours, whereas the legal limit stands at six and a half hours a day.”

● In southern Italy’s Apulia region, a group of foreign workers are harvesting tomatoes. Image: Reuters

As Bai Xiaohong notes in her book, the tomatoes picked by these workers end up canned specifically to feed the supply chains of Europe’s major supermarket multiples. Once again, the retailers’ relentless drive for rock-bottom prices operates behind the scenes: as supermarkets continually squeeze rates from agricultural producers, the axe of cost-cutting inevitably falls on the workforce. Exploiting cross-border labour trapped in a regulatory grey area has become the preferred method for minimising expenses.

Yet it is evident that not everyone supports offering these migrant workers improved conditions. While a report by the UK Parliament proposed incentive measures—including issuing a greater number of visas—to avert labour shortages, it simultaneously lamented that post-Brexit wage increases have eroded the global competitiveness of British produce. In the long run, should supermarkets persist in procuring goods at minimal cost and force producers to suppress wages, any such incentive schemes will amount to little more than hollow promises.

IV.Social Issues Within the Supermarket System

The fragility and exploitative nature of the supermarket system were laid bare during the recent tomato shortage. Yet the ramifications of this retail model extend far beyond agriculture, leaving a deep imprint on society as a whole.

In *Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets*, British journalist Joanna Blythman examines how the supermarket format, which gained prominence from the 1970s onwards, has fundamentally altered British life: middlemen have been wiped out, independent grocers pushed to the margins, and low-income households left with little choice but to rely on the cheapest supermarket offerings. The corporate pricing structure has evolved into a formidable beast, steadily driving profits and wages towards the brink.

George Packer, an American journalist, identifies a striking parallel in *The Unwinding*, noting the profound force of the Walmart model. Packer summarises Sam Walton’s retail philosophy with stark clarity: buy low, sell low, maximise volume, and ensure rapid cash turnaround. Against the backdrop of these retail giants’ unchecked expansion, the Walton family’s amassed wealth eventually equated to that of the bottom thirty percent of Americans combined. Packer observes that, by comparison, “small towns have grown increasingly impoverished, a reality that forces local consumers to depend ever more heavily on the promise of everyday low prices.”

● Supermarkets provide not only cheap food but also an affordable middle-class ideal. It was only with the rise of supermarkets that tomatoes could be supplied reliably year-round, taking centre stage in the British diet. In the 1950s, Britain’s working class ate mainly turnips and swedes; tomatoes were simply a seasonal or luxury vegetable. Today, Britons consume 500,000 tonnes of tomatoes a year, averaging 160g per person each week. Pictured: beefsteak tomatoes from New Smithfield. Image credit: Manchester Evening News

Whether in agriculture or retail, the procurement model employed by large supermarkets and similar major platforms operates on the same logic: leveraging scale to capture market share and extract profits, with little regard for genuine improvements in production. On the surface, consumers undoubtedly benefit from cheap food, yet the true cost behind those low prices is rarely obvious. It comes at the expense of exploited migrant workers, increasingly homogenised and concentrated business models, and the vast amounts of energy consumed in production and transport.

Once independent producers and smaller merchants—those who offered greater autonomy and more diverse career opportunities—have been squeezed out by supermarkets, the system captures virtually all the profits, fueling a steadily widening wealth gap. The cheap alternatives provided by supermarkets, meanwhile, make it easier for workers to tolerate persistently low wages.

Viewed from this angle, cheap supermarket vegetables often function as a form of “welfare” for the poor. The catch is that this arrangement rests on a premise established since the Thatcher era: the state increasingly regards traditional welfare as a burden, trusting instead that market forces will naturally deliver an “optimal solution”. Consequently, supermarket pricing has effectively become a substitute for social welfare.

Yet, the current tomato shortage proves that this “welfare” is far from as stable or reliable as the polished image of big corporations might suggest.

The irony is palpable: as supermarkets across the UK struggle to find tomatoes—a shortage that has escalated into a broader social issue—the very retailers still managing to supply them are the small independent grocers that supermarkets themselves pushed to the margins. Beyond these traditional retail outlets, Britain is home to a growing number of consumer and food movements advocating for a return to “the local”, dedicated to rebuilding communities, reclaiming autonomy, and softening the societal damage inflicted by supermarket monopolies, all in an effort to break free from the grip of this corporate “monster”. At this juncture, Britons might even feel thankful that these smaller shops were not entirely crushed by supermarket expansion, leaving them with a vital lifeline during a crisis. Until deeper reforms to distribution and wealth redistribution are addressed, supporting local retail remains one of the most effective ways to cushion the social harm caused by the supermarket model.

After all, when the storm hits, you cannot expect the very forces that created it to come to your rescue.

References

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/whats-on/shopping/went-supermarkets-across-greater-manchester-26297009

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64743704

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/whats-on/food-drink-news/the-supermarkets-dont-want-pay-26383380

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1738374/tomato-grower-support-perfect-storm-vegetable-shortages

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4953628/British-tomatoes-available-year-round.html

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-17/uk-farmers-look-farther-afield-to-replace-ukrainian-workers#xj4y7vzkg

https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/9580/documents/162177/default/

https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/human-suffering-in-italys-agricultural-value-chain-620479/

https://www.britishtomatoes.co.uk/british-tomato-fortnight-2022