Aldi sells cooking oil with a price increase of 550 percent - cashier reports on hamster experiments
Created: 04/21/2022, 14:54
By: Ines Baur
Sunflower oil at any price?
(Iconic image) © IMAGO/MANUEL GEISSER
Certain cooking oils are currently hard to get - even at Aldi.
The demand determines the supply and discounters sometimes sell goods with enormous surcharges.
Munich – Because of panic buying, the discounter Aldi had already restricted the sale of cooking oil to customers.
Sunflower oil and rapeseed oil are hard to come by because of the war in Ukraine.
"Sunflower oil is the new toilet paper," says a Frankfurt branch manager from Aldi-Süd at
tagesschau.de
.
Customers are flexible and buy alternatives to sunflower and rapeseed oil.
But even with other edible oils, customers are increasingly faced with sparsely stocked shelves in grocery stores.
And now this too: In some Aldi branches, customers can now buy sunflower oil again.
The Ondosol product is now part of the standard range, reports
Focus Online
.
That alone isn't really worth reporting.
But the price for the product does.
Discounter Aldi charges 4.99 euros for the 1-liter bottle.
This makes the cooking oil 3.20 euros more expensive than 1 liter of sun lumen oil from the (sold out) own brand Bellasan.
An ambitious price increase of 550 percent.
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Around 75 euros for 15 liters of cooking oil
And what are the customers doing?
Do the math and leave it?
Rather less, you obviously continue to hoard undeterred.
Because despite the increase in prices, some customers wanted to take a whole box of 15 bottles with them, reports a cashier at an Aldi branch near Aalen.
74.85 euros for 15 liters of cooking oil - that's even better than the price for 15 liters of diesel at a motorway service station.
Normal sunflower oil will soon be as expensive as organic cooking oil or olive oil.
Here, the liter price for conventional products is 6.50 euros on average.
Organic products or special varieties from countries such as Italy, Spain or Greece are more expensive depending on the variety.
Gourmets pay up to 35 euros for a liter of olive oil.
When will the situation on the market calm down again?
According to the Association of the Oilseed Processing Industry in Germany (OVID for short), the war in Ukraine has had a noticeable impact on Germany.
Ukraine, with 51 percent, and Russia, with 27 percent, are the world's most important export countries for sunflower oil.
The oil mill C. Thywissen expects 2.5 million tons of sunflower crude oil from Ukraine by the next harvest in September, Managing Director Detlef Volz told
tagesschau.de.
But at the moment there are no more ships coming from the Ukraine.
When and if there would be deliveries again depends on how long the war will last.
Sunflowers are sown in April.
Should the sowing not take place, the harvest would also fail.