Restaurants “can’t raise prices recklessly…How to respond to the soaring price of tomatoes”
Tomato and paprika shelves are empty at a store in Tesco, the UK’s largest supermarket chain. Some Italian restaurants in the U.K. are removing food with tomatoes from the menu altogether, a report showed.
This is because tomatoes, an essential ingredient in Italian food, have become a naughty boy on the menu due to tomatoes that rise in price when they wake up.
“Some Italian restaurants are excluding tomato-infused menus from their menus,” said Enzo O’Libery, president of the British Italian Chef Association, on the 26th (local time).
According to the president of the association, these restaurants recommend customers to eat “white pizza” or “white sauce pasta,” which contains relatively little tomatoes.In addition, the president of the association said that ricotta cheese is used more when making salads or sauces or added flavor with zucchini and eggplant.
These restaurants cannot raise prices recklessly, so they have come up with their own desperate measures to cope with soaring tomato prices.According to the Italian Chef Association, tomato prices in the UK quadrupled between January and February this year alone. The price of a box of tomatoes was around 초5 earlier this year, but recently it has become 가20.According to the Italian Cuisine Consortium, the price increase has been especially steep recently, tripling the price in the last two weeks alone.
Canned tomatoes also doubled from 15 pounds to 30 pounds (about 47,000 won), and lettuce, an essential ingredient for salad, more than tripled from 7 pounds to 22 pounds (about 35,000 won).”It’s a very difficult situation to run an Italian restaurant,” Olivieri said. Some may have to close. “I can’t even see the light at the end of the tunnel right now,” he said.There is a vegetable and fruit supply chaos in the UK. The scene where the stand is empty at the mart’s Sinseon corner is not unfamiliar recently.The reason is a sharp drop in agricultural production due to abnormal weather in southern Europe and northern Africa. The cause of this supply shortage is abnormal weather such as abnormal high temperatures in winter and heavy snow and hail.The UK relies on imports for 95% of its tomato consumption in the winter of December and March, but even the production of greenhouses in the UK has fallen sharply due to high electricity prices.
The British restaurant industry is calling on the government to introduce a price cap on tomatoes.
The British government said, “The UK’s food supply chain has excellent resilience. “We are well equipped to cope with confusion,” he said, promising to solve the problem. The government said it will meet with industry officials to discuss solutions.
SOPHIA KIM
ASIA JOURNAL
