Tomato Harvest

Tomato sauce on your spaghetti may be harder to come by this year as a global shortage of steel sheets to make cans for food production risks leaving Italian tomatoes rotting in the fields.

“We cannot find cans. Big multinationals are defaulting on their contracts and the price of cans has increased by more than three times,” said Natasha Linhart, chief executive officer of Atlante, which supplies Italian fine-food retailers in several markets including the U.S., U.K., India, Japan and Canada.

Italy is among the world’s biggest producers of processed tomatoes, churning out about 5 million tons a year

Italy churns out about 5 million tons a of processed ripe tomatoes a year, making it one of the world’s top producers. The delectable red fruits are harvested from July to September and need to be canned no more than 36 hours after picking. Any disruptions mean tomatoes will have to be thrown out.

“We don’t know how long this shortage will last, there is no end of the tunnel in sight,” Linhart said.

Demand for cans is being absorbed by China, which saw its economy recover sooner that the rest of the world. This means steel suppliers from India, like Tata Steel, but also from Italy, like Ilva, are not immediately able to deliver to their Italian customers, she said.

Italy is particularly affected because it does not use cartons as much. California for example, which is the only other market to process more tomatoes than Italy at about 10 million tons a year, has a bigger focus on concentrates like tomato paste, which need different packaging.

Italian tomatoes are almost all packaged fresh and canned, then are divided into categories, like peeled, chopped, diced and crushed depending on the flavor and texture a chef wants.

Charted Territory

The Federal Reserve continues to see both labor and material shortages mounting across the U.S. economy. In the Fed’s most recent Beige Book report, the central bank references “shortage” or “shortages” 44 times, up seven mentions from a previous decade-high total in April. Before the pandemic kicked into full swing, such references were limited to a half-dozen or less.

This article originally appeared in Bloomberg News.