'Two Bottles Per Person': Supermarket Chain in UK Starts Rationing Cooking Oil, Media Says

Another supermarket chain, Sainbury’s, has also reportedly announced that they are going to substitute products that contain sunflower oil as the main ingredient.

The ongoing crisis in Ukraine has apparently affected the availability of sunflower oil in Britain, where Waitrose supermarket has started to ration the amount of this commodity customers can buy, MailOnline reports.

According to the newspaper, signs on shelves in Waitrose stores warn customers that they are limited to only two bottles of cooking oil per person.

"We want to ensure customers continue to have a choice of cooking oil so we are asking them to buy no more than two units each," a statement issued by Waitrose said. "To help more customers get the goods they need you can only order two from the sunflower oil category."

Meanwhile, Sainbury’s supermarket chain has announced that they are going to substitute products that contain sunflower oil as the main ingredient.

"We are working closely with our suppliers to make sure customers continue to have cooking oils to choose from, including olive oil, vegetable oil and rapeseed oil," a spokesperson for the company said.

And Edible Oils, which the newspaper describes as UK’s biggest cooking oil bottler, reportedly warned last week that the country has just "a few weeks' supply of sunflower oil" left.

Kim Matthews, commercial director at Edible Oils, said previously that 80 percent of the global supply of sunflower oil comes from Russia and Ukraine, according to BBC.

"So obviously, with everything going on out there, we physically can't get sunflower to be coming out of the country," he said.

Matthews also explained that, while Ukrainian farmers at this time "should be sowing the seeds now for the harvest in October and November", that is "not going to happen".

On 24 February, Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine after the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics, which Moscow formally recognised earlier, asked for assistance to defend themselves from attacks by Ukrainian troops.

The Russian government stated that the goal of this operation is to neutralise Ukraine's military capacity, with precision strikes being carried out specifically against the Ukrainian military infrastructure.

In response, the United States, the EU and several other countries imposed tough economic sanctions against Russia.