Several restaurants in London are raising their menu prices as supply chain disruptions have made it much more expensive to source certain ingredients. While the corona restrictions for the English catering industry will be almost wholly lifted on Monday, the difficult time for the restaurants is not over yet.
According to a tour by news agency Bloomberg, British catering entrepreneurs are suffering from the large driver shortage in the country. It is also difficult for the catering industry to find staff. And some entrepreneurs fear that the situation will never be quite the way it used to be, as some Britons will probably continue to work from home a few days a week. So they don’t get a sandwich around lunchtime at a sandwich shop near their office.
Bin Li, the Chinese restaurant chain Murger Han, says that Brexit is a particular problem for him. As a result, it has become much more expensive for him to buy products from the eurozone. Vegetables are now sometimes twice as expensive as more than six months ago, he emphasizes. However, Li doesn’t want to raise his prices just yet. For the time being, he will bear the additional costs so as not to deter customers.
Recent UK inflation figures also indicate that life across the Channel is rapidly becoming more expensive. Consumer prices across the board were 2.5 percent higher in June than a year earlier.
This made the overall price level the most substantial increase in almost three years. This sharp increase was primarily attributable to higher prices of, for example, petrol and diesel. UK fuel prices have been on the rise since 2010, mainly due to the global oil market situation.