Food shortages: Preston green grocer urges people to shop local as Lancashire supermarket shelves are left bare

Why is there a shortage?

Shelves across Lancashire have been left bare of tomatoes, whilst the stocks of some other fresh produce are also dwindling, due to combination of bad weather, which disrupted harvests, and transport problems in Africa and Europe.

What restrictions are in place?

Asda has introduced a three per-customer limit on tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, salad bags and raspberries. Our photographer headed to Fulwood Asda to check out the empty shelves and the new food restriction signs.

Morrisons has also introduced limits of two items per customer on tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and lettuce, whilst both Tesco and Aldi have a limit of three for peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes.

What is the situation with local traders?

Becky Taylor, manager of Fresh and Fruity at Preston Market says they have not run out of any produce, unlike the supermarkets, and so no restrictions are in place for them.

Urging people to shop local, Becky explained: “There’s been a lot of shortages in the supermarkets at the moment, a lot of news reporting of it, but we haven’t had any shortages, we’ve got very good supliers, we get a lot of our produce from Liverpool wholesale markets and it’s been fine for us. We also can rely on our local growers, we have our own farm – Lodge Farm in Hesketh Bank, less than 10 miles away so we can grow a lot of it on there – we’ve got local spinach coming in, just started. We’ve had a lot of people coming in saying all the supermarket shelves are compeletly empty but they’ve managed to come down to Preston and buy a lot from us, tomatoes, icebeg lettuce, cucumbers, peppers, all that stuff.

“We’ve heard that there’s been some really bad weather in Spain and it’s killed all the crops so they’ve not been able to grow as much or they’ve lost all their crops so yeah we’ve been very lucky to get what we have.

“We always try to keep our shelves fully stocked up of every produce we sell so support your local small businesses, your local green grocers and your local markets.”