Supermarkets have begun to remove some of their purchase limits on fresh fruit and vegetables, introduced after widespread salad shortages and gaps on shelves.
Asda has lifted limits on customers buying cucumbers, salad bags, broccoli, cauliflower and raspberries, after the retailer said supply of these items had improved. However, customers are still limited to buying a maximum of three packets of tomatoes and peppers each, but Asda said the situation was easing, and it expected to return to normal levels within a couple of weeks.
Morrisons has also removed the cap on purchases of cucumbers, but is still limiting shoppers to a maximum of two packets of tomatoes, lettuce and peppers per customer.
Asda, along with Tesco, Morrisons, Aldi and Lidl, introduced rationing of various fruit and vegetable lines in late February, as a result of shortages caused by unusually cold weather in Europe and north Africa, which affected some crop harvests.
The challenges accessing sufficient supply of these items, the majority of which are imported to the UK during the winter, was also exacerbated by British growers cutting back on production as the cost of energy required to heat and light the glasshouses soared.
Shoppers began to complain on social media of low stocks of items such as cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes around 20 February after importers struggled to obtain their usual levels of fresh produce. At the time, suppliers and retailers predicted the shortages would last for a couple of weeks until the harvest, delayed in some cases by the poor weather, could begin in places such as Spain and Morocco.
Some of Britain’s largest supermarket chains introduced buying limits on items such as tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers, in an attempt to avoid empty shelves and to allow as many customers as possible to buy what they required.
Amid the shortages, British growers and the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) said they had been warning for some time that food producers were facing soaring costs of energy, fertiliser and other necessities, and in some cases were not being paid enough to cover the cost of production.
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The NFU’s deputy president, Tom Bradshaw, said last month that a reliance on imports had left the UK particularly exposed to “shock weather events”.
