Iceland Foods chair Richard Walker has said the retailer is trialling vertical lettuce farms amid the current fruit and veg shortages which are “outside everyone’s control”.
Speaking to Nick Ferrari on LBC’s morning show, Walker said that the frozen food specialist was in “an OK shape” with regards to the ongoing supply issues which have seen Lidl, Asda, Tesco and Aldi imposing limits on the amount shoppers can buy.
“We’re in the same boat as others in that our supply of fresh veg is challenged,” he said, confirming that the retailer hasn’t yet put any caps or limits on purchases of affected items.
“Of course, we’re frozen specialists, but you can’t freeze cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce. That’s the problem. This is a short term issue, and it’s outside of everyone’s control – business, the government…Â it’s due to bad weather in Morocco.”
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Walker also said that he did not believe the shortages were due to Brexit, as has been previously suggested by a number of suppliers and organisations, including the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), who recently described the current lack of fresh produce as being the “tip of the iceberg”.
“I don’t see that at all. That’s not my experience running a supermarket,” he said, adding that the issue would be less of an immediate concern if the UK had “bigger domestic production”.
Acknowledging how tough it is for farmers due to the rising cost of energy sending heating bills soaring, Walker pointed out that it “costs a fortune to heat greenhouses and that’s why they’ve shut off a lot of production”.
As part of Iceland Food’s bid to help ramp up UK production it is beginning to produce vertically farmed lettuce, which will be on sale in stores across the UK in a matter of weeks.
The high-tech “lettuce walls” – which will be a “couple of stories high” – will be housed in big greenhouses, meaning Iceland does not need to worry that its supply will be affected by “climate change or bad weather”.
Grown in high quality conditions and pesticide-free, the lettuces themselves will be picked by robots and remain “untouched by human hands”.
Asked whether the UK will see more food shortages in the future, Walker said that extremes in weather could mean that food shortages are “something we’re just going to have to get more used to”.
“We’re obviously very sorry to customers at the moment, but we just need them to cope for two, three weeks until this is sorted,” he said, adding that the Iceland Foods team “work day and night” to make sure the supply lines are running.
