About: http://data.cimple.eu/news-article/fbaa1001404e365100bd17f9512adc268116613477f71ce50de35814     Goto   Sponge   NotDistinct   Permalink

An Entity of Type : schema:NewsArticle, within Data Space : data.cimple.eu associated with source document(s)

AttributesValues
rdf:type
schema:articleBody
  • "Flour is one of those invisible bits of the food chain until it isn't there," said Alex Waugh, director general at Nabim, which represents Britain's millers producing the staple. Along with pasta, rice and tinned food, flour is hard to come by in UK supermarkets since shoppers began stockpiling in large quantities around a month ago, even before the country went into lockdown. Despite bread being easy to find on supermarket shelves, Britons are increasingly making their own as the closure of restaurants and takeaways leads to more home cooking generally. Others are turning to baking cakes to help pass the time. The result has been a doubling of flour purchases to four million packets per week, according to Nabim. "I don't remember any time like this," said Waugh. Supermarkets have reacted by limiting the amount of packets that can be bought by each customer. Britain's biggest retailer Tesco is limiting shoppers to three of the same item on its entire range of products, both in store and online. "We're overwhelmed with orders," said David Wright, general manager of flour producer GR Wright and Sons, adding that online orders had rocketed from a dozen to 800 in just two days. "We had to close the shop," he told AFP. The family company born in the 19th century has to go back to the late 1970s, scene of a UK bakers' strike, to recall such a tense situation. "It's been difficult, particularly with the number of staff that has had to go in self-isolation," said Wright, noting the difficulty of keeping a 24/7 operation going when losing a fifth of its staff. Demand is not being met, even if flour stockpiles were built up amid fear of a no-deal Brexit ahead of Britain's eventual departure from the European Union on January 31 -- a pivotal event that seems a distant memory amid the COVID-19 outbreak. The surge in demand has meanwhile had a knock-on effect for other sectors, including the paper mills, who do not have sufficient capacity to produce the amount of packaging needed. Taking the pressure off however has been a shutdown of 2,000 shops by British bakery chain Greggs. Flour millers meanwhile stress that they are not reaping financial benefits from the soaring demand, with the British pound weak and wheat priced in dollars. "I don't think people are making lots of money, at least not the millers," said Wright. ved-bcp/rfj/rl
schema:headline
  • UK flour millers ground down by virus-fuelled demand
schema:mentions
schema:author
schema:datePublished
http://data.cimple...sPoliticalLeaning
http://data.cimple...logy#hasSentiment
http://data.cimple...readability_score
Faceted Search & Find service v1.16.115 as of Oct 09 2023


Alternative Linked Data Documents: ODE     Content Formats:   [cxml] [csv]     RDF   [text] [turtle] [ld+json] [rdf+json] [rdf+xml]     ODATA   [atom+xml] [odata+json]     Microdata   [microdata+json] [html]    About   
This material is Open Knowledge   W3C Semantic Web Technology [RDF Data] Valid XHTML + RDFa
OpenLink Virtuoso version 07.20.3238 as of Jul 16 2024, on Linux (x86_64-pc-linux-musl), Single-Server Edition (126 GB total memory, 5 GB memory in use)
Data on this page belongs to its respective rights holders.
Virtuoso Faceted Browser Copyright © 2009-2025 OpenLink Software