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In this edition of the bottom line, we're looking at supply chain disruptions, or shortages, as we'd normally call them.

Hello, welcome to the programme. Don't we take a lot for granted? Water coming out of taps and Wi-Fi coming out of the wall, but above all, day-to-day

stocks of everything available on demand. But what happens when the stocks are not there, when

the supply bit of supply and demand breaks down? That's what we are exploring today. Disruption

to the flow of goods, the supply chain. Shortages have been

in the headlines over the past few months from KFC running out of chicken at hundreds of its

fast food outlets to a lack of CO2 to put the fizz into our summer beer, or more seriously,

to allergy sufferers having to rely on out-of-date adrenaline injectors

as a shortage of epipens hit the globe.

We'll look at causes, consequences and cures to shortages,

from innocuous to severe ones.

Well, I'm with three guests who have thought more about this than most,

and let's meet them.

And first up is Tim O'Malley, group managing director of nationwide produce.

Tim, nationwide produce, what do you do? How big are you?

We're 120 million turnover. We're established in 1975. We basically do everything in fresh produce.

We grow it. We grade it. We pack it. We trade it. We import. we export. But the main thing we do is nowadays is import. So about two-thirds of the produce that we buy is from outside the UK. Right. And who do you sell it to? We call ourselves non-retail specialists, but we supply the retailers indirectly because we're bulk. So we buy and sell produce in bulk. So we would supply the people who supply the retailers. That's why it's called a chain. Yes, it's why it's called a chain. Our main market is food service, which is basically the restaurant and canteen sector, and then wholesale import and export. So give me an example. I mean, on a given day, how many trucks are running around on your behalf? About 74 Arctic loads of produce from around you. So we got one business in Spain, two in Holland, one in Belfast and four on the UK mainland. This year we've had a lot of talk of shortages. The weather has obviously been behind some of that. Have you noticed? What would you say this year has been in terms of shortages? What have you been losing sleepover? Root crops in particular. Potatoes, carrots, onions, which are three of the

main crops, obviously. So what happened then this year? What's been the story? We had the perfect

storm this year of bad weather. We started off with a beach from the east, which reduced us

all temperatures. Then we had a cold and wet spring. And you don't want to plant anything in less than 6 degrees C, and it was certainly colder than that. So that made all the plantings late. And then we had a heat wave. And a plant, a crop at 25 degrees C, if you water it, it will keep alive. If you don't water it, irrigate it, as we call it,

it will die. So... But it won't actually grow. It won't grow. It stops. Yeah.

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