The produce industry is in quite the pickle: There’s a cucumber shortage.
Cucumbers are in short supply overseas, as supermarket chains report surging sales of the humble food and hypothesize that the demand could be due to viral recipes circulating on TikTok.
Iceland in particular is experiencing a shortage as local farmers — who harvest about six million cucumbers a year — are struggling to keep up with booming business, the country’s farmers association, the Horticulturists’ Sales Company, told BBC.
The refreshing vegetable has become a social media star this summer thanks to one content creator posting his easy recipes. nipaporn – stock.adobe.com
When Reykjavik resident Daniel Sigthorsson, 30, went to his local grocer to pick up the items to make his own cucumber salad, he was dumbfounded by the empty shelves where the green vegetable should be. It was a real head-scratcher, then, when cucumbers were sold out at the second and third stores he went to.
“I was like, ‘That’s weird,’” he told the New York Times. “That’s one of the things we never run out of in Iceland. And then I saw the news.”
The lack of cucumbers is rotten news for those wanting to try one of the viral recipes circulated by TikTokker Logan Moffitt, lovingly nicknamed “the cucumber guy,” who first shot to produce popularity earlier this summer due to his cucumber salad concoction.
Sales for cucumbers — and the common ingredients necessary for cucumber salads — are up in Iceland grocers. Mila Naumova – stock.adobe.com
“Sometimes you need to eat an entire cucumber,” the Ontario creator, 23, states in many of his videos before launching into one of his simple kitchen tutorials.
Moffitt’s following count is 5.6 million, and the videos of his mouth-watering creations regularly surpass millions of views — and, as it seems, prompt a national shortage of the key ingredient.
“We are, just literally, eating it up,” 29-year-old Gudny Ljosba Hreinsdottir, who operates the tourism company Wake Up Reykjavik, told The Times.
Kronan, a local grocery chain, typically grows most of its cucumbers in greenhouses, but the company told The Times that they required an emergency shipment of the produce this week to meet demand — it sold out across its various locations.
Kronan also reported that sales for other ingredients involved in typical cucumber salad recipes like sesame oil, fish sauce and rice vinegar soared 200% since the beginning of the month. Meanwhile, Hagkaup, another local grocer, also saw sales for sesame oil and cucumber double.
“A few people can have a lot of influence,” Haflidi Halldorsson, who works in marketing for an Icelandic sheep farming company, told The Times.
Moffitt regularly posts cucumber recipe tutorials online. Tiktok/@logagm
While some experts are skeptical that Moffitt’s videos are the primary reason for a cucumber shortage, there’s no doubt the vegetable is lacking from grocery shelves. Tiktok/@logagm
Some experts are skeptical of a connection between Moffitt and the cucumber shortage, believing there are other factors at play.
Kristín Linda Sveinsdóttir, the marketing director for the Horticulturists’ Sales Company, told BBC that it could be a combination of TikTok fascination, kids heading back to school and farmers replacing cucumber plants at the end of the season.
“Everything is happening at the same time,” she said, noting that if the trend had picked up any earlier online, “when the [cucumber] production was in full blast,” there would have been a negligible difference in sales.
“This is the first time we have experienced something like this,” she added.