Market Loop - Cooking oil supplies run low

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4th April 2022

Bite-sized business news from the UK and beyond

Good morning Congratulations to the Oxford men and Cambridge women rowing teams who won their respective races yesterday. 2022's Boat Race marked the return of the event to the Thames in London for the first time since 2019 because of the pandemic.

Today's stories

Cooking oil supplies run low
Amazon workers vote for first labour union

FOOD
Cooking oil supplies run low

What’s going on?
The UK’s largest supplier of sunflower oil says it only has a few weeks of stock left as the war in Ukraine is disrupting supplies.

Why is this important?

For the past few months, the supply of crude oil has made headlines but now oil of the cooking variety is taking the limelight.

Ukraine and Russia supply 80% of the world's sunflower supply, and the conflict has caused serious disruption to imports to the UK.

In response, manufacturers of foods that use the oil in production, are tweaking their recipes to make use of alternative ingredients. This means the taste of crisps, oven chips and biscuits could change.

Springtime is usually when Ukrainian sunflower farmers sow seeds for harvest in October and November. But the war means this schedule has been disordered which will have knock on impacts for months and even years to come.

Zooming out

Sunflower is used in the production of hundreds of food items and is the UK’s consumer most popular cooking oil.

Rapeseed oil is very similar and will be the first-choice alternative for many manufacturers.

In a situation where supply is constrained or demand increases that can mean only one thing – higher prices. Food inflation, already at a decade high, is set to rise even further as retailers pass on higher prices to consumers.

Other stories to keep you in the loop

Minister rules out energy rationing in UK despite Ukraine crisis
P&O Ferries faces criminal probe over sackings
EasyJet cancels hundreds of flights due to high levels of COVID-related absences
Sberbank’s UK arm faces collapse amid Russia sanctions
Chris Hemsworth's fitness app bought for $300m
Lush pledges to invest in UK stores after return to profit
London tech investor drops cofounder charged with assault
Trump's Truth Social app branded a disaster

ONLINE
Amazon workers vote for first labour union

In a landmark vote, workers at an Amazon warehouse in New York have chosen to form a union. Around half of the 8,300 workers turned out to the ballot, and of that 55% voted in favour of unionising.

Amazon has expanded quickly during the pandemic to cope with the boom in online shopping. The ecommerce giant now has 1.6m employees globally and is the second largest employer in the US. But the company has faced criticism for poor working conditions and many workers believe unionising is the way to improve employee treatment.

The vote in New York is a major breakthrough for the American labour movement and will likely have ripple effects across the country. Union membership of private sector workers in the US has been falling for decades and now stands at 6%, compared to 13% in the UK.

Amazon has been fiercely fighting unionisation efforts, arguing that workers get a better deal when they deal with the company directly rather than via a union.

It continues to be difficult for workers to organise, so the success of the Amazon workers in New York is significant—even more so because it’s not affiliated with a larger union.

The workers will now face a second fight in contract negotiations in which they will call for higher pay, better benefits and leave, anti-discrimination policies, and more.

Stat of the day

The value of the UK video games market continued to grow in 2021, reaching a record high of £7.2bn

Interesting links from around the web

4 signs you may have a weak immune system—and what to do about it
After over 20 years, scientists have finished mapping the human genome. What happens next?
The workers losing their ambition

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Market Loop - Cooking oil supplies run low

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