Whether it’s fried, baked or mashed, potatoes have traditionally been a low-cost staple food in the UK – but not any more. A surge in costs is clobbering high street chippies, while in the supermarket, oven chips and the once humble baking potato are casualties of soaring grocery prices, as Zoe Wood reports for The Guardian.
Woods writes that some fish and chip shops could opt to close after the cost of 25kg sacks more than doubled to £20, according to Andrew Crook, who speaks for the industry as the president of the National Federation of Fish Friers.
“People might just shut their shop due to all the other costs as well,” he said. “They were barely keeping their heads above water, so this is going to be a step too far. Some shops will close until potato prices settle down but some it may put under.”
Mark Taylor, the chair of the industry group GB Potatoes, said that in 2022 growers had faced a “perfect storm” as Brexit, Covid and the invasion of Ukraine pushed up production costs. Meanwhile, smaller crop yields in the UK and mainland Europe last year meant “there is a supply and demand equation going on as well”.
Source: The Guardian. Read the full story here
Photo: Harpers Fish and Chips. Wiki Commons
