Especially in Spain and Morocco, where growers are receiving very high prices at the moment for their produce, if they have anything available at least. Prices for Spanish eggplants for example, were as high as 4.20 euro per kilo last week. Courgettes where sold at a price of 3.40 euro per kilo. The extremely high prices also apply to other greenhouse crops such as tomatoes, bell peppers and cucumbers. It is expected that this trend will continue for a few more weeks, until more supply from Holland becomes available again. The situation is said to be so dramatic that traders are even depending on imported produce from the United States.
(Prices per kilo, in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th week of January. Source: Spanish produce export organization FEPEX)
So less availability and high earnings for the growers. You would expect that the consumer would be paying for this in the supermarket? Well, its quite the opposite. According to the latest data from market intelligence service ProduceView, the prices of tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers in British supermarkets have not even seen any increase at all.
Moroccan cherry tomatoes at Tesco for example, were priced at 2.70 £/kgKG at the beginning of the year and the price was lowered to 2.40 £/kg last week and eventually 2.30 £/kg this week. Spanish bell peppers saw an increase of just 1 pence per kilo last week at Tesco.
Only discounter Lidl seems to be affected by the lower supplies of cherry tomatoes from Spain. The supermarket increased the prices with 70 pence over the last three weeks, from 1.90 £/kg to 2.60 £/kg this week.
Nonetheless, Aldi decreased the price of the Cherry tomatoes, from 2.20 £/kg to 1.90 £/kg this week.
Another price increase could be seen at Asda, where the price of a traffic light with 3 bell peppers increased from 93 p to 1 pound.
Other than this, we did not see any remarkable increases in the UK retail prices of the Spanish, Moroccan and Israeli greenhouse vegetables. All prices remain quite stable and the supermarkets seem to have a very good buying strategy.
Feel free to drop us an email to let us know your opinion about this.
This article was made with data prepared by ProduceView. For more information about their UK retail reports:
Market Intelligence Services Ltd
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Email: info@produceview.co.uk
www.produceview.co.uk