Recipes for crisps and oven chips change amid sunflower oil shortage

Edible Oils, which packages oil for 75 per cent of the UK retail market, says it has a few weeks of sunflower oil supplies left after the war in Ukraine caused major disruption to imports.

Over the past five years, Russia and Ukraine produced almost 80 per cent of the world’s sunflower seed oil.

The looming crisis is so serious that manufacturers of foods that contain sunflower oil, like crisps, oven chips and cereal bars, are being forced to change their recipes.

Kim Matthews, commercial director at Edible Oils, said: “From a UK consumer perspective, sunflower oil is the biggest oil. It’s used more than anything else.

"It’s a fast moving situation. We’re still trying to see if we can get some more but it’s looking very tight.

"At the moment, Ukrainian farmers should be sowing the seeds now for the harvest in October and November. Clearly that’s not going to happen…. we’re probably going to miss the season so we could be impacted for 12-18 months.”

It comes after the Food Standards Agency (FSA) warned that some food products labelled as having sunflower oil may instead contain refined rapeseed oil due to supply issues caused by the war.

Some manufacturers have had to urgently replace sunflower with refined rapeseed oil before being able to make the change on the label, the agency said.

The food safety risk of substituting sunflower oil with refined rapeseed oil was “very low”, they added.

Sunflower oil can be found in hundreds of products including ready meals, biscuits and mayonnaise.

FSA chief executive Emily Miles said: “FSA have been working hard to understand the recent pressures on our food supply chain and the interim measures needed to make sure certain foods – like crisps, breaded fish, frozen vegetables and chips – remain on sale here.

“We have looked at the immediate food safety risk of substituting sunflower oil with refined rapeseed oil – particularly to people with a food allergy – and it is very low.

“We know allergic reactions to rapeseed oil are very rare and – if they do occur – are mild.

“Retaining consumer trust remains an absolute priority for both organisations and we are urgently working with the food industry and other partners to ensure labels on food where sunflower oil has been replaced by refined rapeseed oil are made accurate as soon as possible.”

Andrea Martinez-Inchausti, the director of food for the British Retail Consortium, said: “The war in Ukraine has disrupted supplies of sunflower oil to the UK. Where sunflower oil exists as an ingredient in products, retailers will be substituting it with other safe oils, such as rapeseed oil.

“Retailers are looking to change product labels as soon as possible; where sunflower oil is a key ingredient, such as crisps, retailers will imprint information on substitute oil onto existing labels.

“Retailers’ customer services will be answering questions on all their own brand products.”