Extreme weather is rewiring our food system.
Food retailers are ramping up their investments in British farming and locking in long term agreements with domestic growers. Last month, Sainsbury’s signed two ten year agreements with British glasshouses. This winter, 60 per cent of the company’s cucumbers will be grown domestically, up from none.
This is a striking shift away from business as usual. As volatile weather becomes more disruptive, businesses are being forced to rethink. The UK has untapped capacity to grow more of its own fruit and vegetables, which could pave the way for a more resilient, self sufficient food system, but only if domestic production can keep up.
Climate change is straining supply chains
The UK depends heavily on food produced abroad. We import roughly 40 per cent of our groceries overall, but that includes 44 per cent of our vegetables and 86 per cent of our fruit. Imports keep us fed, especially in times of poor domestic harvests. Lean, hyper-optimised supply chains have also brought once unimaginable diversity to our plates, all year round.
But our food supply lacks resilience. A ‘just in time’ supply system means the UK only has five to ten days’ worth of food available at any one time to feed the nation. Fresh produce is particularly vulnerable.
As climate shocks devastate yields across major food producing regions, we’ve seen imports quickly falter, leaving us exposed. So far, in 2026, floods, droughts and heatwaves across the countries that supply us with large amounts of our fruit and vegetables, such as Spain and Morocco, have left supermarket shelves empty of peppers, tomatoes and berries. This summer, retailers chose to leave shelves bare of cucumbers, rather than pay more to import them when crop failures caused prices to spike.
These shortfalls are no longer one-offs. And they are exposing a fundamental truth about our food supply: that it has become highly vulnerable to crises beyond our control.
Inaction risks national health and security
Government intelligence has warned that ecosystem degradation and collapse “will put UK food security at risk”. This is not only an issue for national security, but for people’s health and social inequality too.
When prices rise, it is the least well off who are forced to make tough choices. Households on the lowest incomes would need to spend 85 per cent of their disposable income to eat the government’s recommended diet. Per calorie, healthy foods are almost twice as expensive as unhealthy alternatives, meaning that, at a time when people are experiencing hardship, cutting back compromises their ability to eat a nutritious diet. This risks widening already growing health inequalities.
To address the growing risk, five of the UK’s largest retailers have called for a Good Food Bill which includes national targets to increase the proportion of fruit and vegetables grown in Britain.
More homegrown production could safeguard our food supply
Fortunately, the government can act rapidly to build a more resilient food system. It has already committed to a horticulture sector growth plan to expand homegrown fresh produce. But where and how this production is scaled matters.
We found that by replacing half of the fruit and vegetables currently imported with domestic produce that can be grown domestically, UK self sufficiency could return to 66 per cent, a level not seen since 2000. This would also add £1.9 billion to the economy.
Expanding indoor production will be crucial. Glasshouses produce large volumes of food, use minimal land and water and are less affected by weather conditions. By controlling growing conditions, they have unique potential to increase domestic food production throughout the year, without requiring the unrealistic area of land that would be needed for the field cultivation of crops. Our analysis revealed that, by value, 68 per cent of new production could come from these systems.
The horticulture sector growth plan will be pivotal
However, increasing domestic fruit and vegetable production isn’t without its challenges. Horticulture has been long overlooked by agriculture policy. Growers have experienced soaring production costs, exacerbated by spikes in fossil fuel gas and fertiliser prices, and output has been shrinking since 2015. Producers are simultaneously battling increasingly wet winters and hotter, drier summers.
Creating a more productive and resilient sector will require clear ambition and a coherent delivery plan. We are calling for the horticulture sector growth plan to include a nationwide spatial strategy to identify where and how expansion could take place. It will need to explore how the new domestic production capacity would cope with the UK’s shifting climate and strained water supply, such as through making measures like on-farm reservoirs faster and simpler to implement.
As an immediate priority, it will need to help producers make a decent profit, including through better access to reliable, affordable and low carbon energy. Increasing access to clean energy initiatives, such as schemes that lower costs for energy intensive industries, and co-locating new glasshouses alongside industrial sites that generate waste heat, including new AI data centres, are two ways this can be achieved.
In an unstable world, the government has the power to influence how our food is produced in the UK. The horticulture sector growth plan could be a turning point, increasing investment in fruit and vegetable production that guarantees a reliable supply of healthy, nutritious food for the nation.
Read more about what’s needed to scale up the UK’s domestic horticulture industry in ‘How the horticulture sector growth plan can support health, security and the economy’.
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