The produce industry is quite difficult: there is a shortage of cucumbers.
Cucumbers are in short supply overseas, as supermarket chains report increased sales of the humble food and hypothesize that demand may be due to viral recipes circulating on TikTok.
Iceland in particular is experiencing a shortage as local farmers – who harvest around six million cucumbers a year – are struggling to keep up with the booming business, the country’s farmers’ association, the Horticulturists’ Sales Company, told the BBC.
When Reykjavik resident Daniel Sigthorsson, 30, went to his local grocer to pick up the ingredients to make his own cucumber salad, he was stunned by the empty shelves where the greens should have been. It was a real scratch, then, when the cucumbers sold out at the second and third stores he went to.
“I was like, ‘This is weird,'” he told the New York Times. “This is one of the things we never run out of in Iceland. And then I saw the news.”
The lack of cucumbers is bad news for those who want to try one of the viral recipes circulated by TikTokker Logan Moffitt, affectionately nicknamed “the cucumber guy,” which first went viral earlier this summer due to his cucumber salad mix.
“Sometimes you have to eat a whole cucumber,” the Ontario creator, 23, says in many of his videos before launching into one of his simple cooking lessons.
Moffitt’s follower count is 5.6 million, and videos of his amazing creations regularly exceed millions of views — and, apparently, cause a national shortage of the key ingredient.
“We’re literally eating it up,” 29-year-old Gudny Ljosba Hreinsdottir, who runs the Wake Up Reykjavik tour company, told The Times.