The ongoing tomato shortage in the UK is causing all sorts of interesting responses from shoppers and businesses. There are reports of  increases in tomato-free pizzas appearing on restaurant menus. Supermarkets report selling out of turnips in response to the UK Environment Secretary’s endorsement of the root vegetable. And in Suffolk, a pizza has been invented that uses turnip for the base. But what really piqued my interest was the news that vegetable seed sales have “rocketed”, and that there has been a huge increase in the number of people searching for advice on how to grow ones own vegetables. I was slightly sceptical when I heard this – tomatoes take a while to grow and can’t be planted outside in the UK until after the last frost (which is typically April to May in England) – so I set out to see if I could find some corroborating evidence of this uptick in grow-your-own activity.        

Whilst maybe not the obvious place to go for your vegetable seeds, eBay is a fairly thriving marketplace for all things grow-your-own related (in 2022, just under £2m was spent on vegetable seeds on eBay). And some quick analysis of historic sales data provides support for the view that we might be seeing an uptick in the desire to grow ones own vegetables. 

The chart below shows weekly sales of tomato seeds on eBay UK for the first nine weeks of 2022 and 2023. In both 2022 (dashed line) and 2023 (solid line), sales appear to have gradually increased in the first six weeks of the calendar year, consistent with the weather starting to get warmer and people turning their attention to seed germination as Spring approaches. But whilst sales then remained broadly stable towards the end of February and beginning of March in 2022, sales during the same three weeks of 2023 – around the time that the tomato shortage started affecting supermarkets – were significantly higher year-on-year. Most noticeably, in the week commencing 20 February 2023, sales of tomato seeds on eBay UK were almost double what they were during the same week last year.

These sales figures aren’t vast in monetary terms – last week’s sales of tomato seeds on eBay UK were around £33k. But if the average pack contains 50 seeds and costs £2 (roughly), then a £15k increase in sales of seeds translates to additional sales of 375,500 tomato seeds relative to the same week last year. That’s quite an uptick, but probably not enough to make much of a dent in Britain’s annual tomato consumption of 500,000 tonnes. 

As with all these things, there’s a risk of conflating correlation and causation here – maybe something else caused an uptick in tomato seed sales in the last few weeks. But the chart above is definitely consistent with the idea that the tomato shortage could have triggered this. And it’s not just tomato seeds where you see this significant increase in seed sales in the last few weeks. The chart below shows the same sales data but for salad seeds (bags of salad are also affected by the current shortage, and are being rationed by some supermarkets). The pattern in the last few weeks is pretty similar as above for tomato seeds; weekly sales of salad seeds last week were significantly higher than the same time in 2022. 

Clearly a pack of tomato or salad seeds isn’t much use if you want to make a nutritious salad for lunch tomorrow. Personal experience (with mixed success) suggests a four to six month lead time between sowing tomato seeds and getting a harvest. So either people are worried that there still may be shortages of fresh produce six months from now and want to hedge against that possibility. Or the recent shortages have prompted people to develop their own self-supply strategy to guard against future shortages – (self) supply-side substitution in action? Or it could be something else completely. Like everyone is panic buying tomato seeds because they’re worried that’ll be where the next shortage is. Who knows, but I do hope those extra seed packs don’t gather dust, and that this summer sees record harvests of home-grown tomatoes in the UK 😊.

In the meantime, I’m off to buy some seeds to grow my own semiconductors.