Tesco to ration cooking oil purchases as war in Ukraine hikes food prices

theguardian.com:

Tesco has become the latest supermarket to ration cooking oil as the Russia-Ukraine war chokes off the flow of sunflower oil to the UK food industry, further raising the cost of popular items such as crisps and chips.

Most of the UK’s sunflower oil comes from Ukraine and the war has had a devastating impact on availability as exports ground to a halt. With firms left scrabbling to source other vegetable oils, the price of cooking oil in the shops is about a 20% higher than a year ago.

Tesco has introduced a buying limit of three bottles per customer across its entire cooking oil range. The UK’s biggest retailer says it has good availability of cooking oil but on its website a small number of vegetable oils are out of stock.

Tesco is following in the footsteps of Morrisons and Waitrose which have already limited purchases to two a person. Waitrose said it was “closely monitoring the situation and working with our suppliers to ensure customers continue to have a choice of cooking oils”. Sainsbury’s and Asda have yet to take any action.

As well as being a cupboard staple at home, sunflower oil can also be found in hundreds of products, from ready meals to crisps, and biscuits to mayonnaise.

Tom Lock, founder of The British Snack Company, which makes hand-cooked crisps for sale in pubs, said that after potatoes, its other key ingredient was sunflower oil.

“Sunflower oil is the industry standard for snacks,” said Lock who explained the company had been forced to switch to rapeseed oil. “It is impossible to get sunflower oil in any quantity. You just can’t get it. We’ve secured enough rapeseed to get us through to August, but we are paying three times as much for it as we were for sunflower oil a year ago.”

Lock said it was