“Few people can have a lot of influence”

The produce industry is quite difficult: there is a shortage of cucumbers.

Cucumbers are in short supply overseas, as supermarket chains report increased sales of the humble food and hypothesize that demand may be due to viral recipes circulating on TikTok.

Iceland in particular is experiencing a shortage as local farmers – who harvest around six million cucumbers a year – are struggling to keep up with the booming business, the country’s farmers’ association, the Horticulturists’ Sales Company, told the BBC.

When Reykjavik resident Daniel Sigthorsson, 30, went to his local grocer to pick up the ingredients to make his own cucumber salad, he was stunned by the empty shelves where the greens should have been. It was a real scratch, then, when the cucumbers sold out at the second and third stores he went to.

“I was like, ‘This is weird,'” he told the New York Times. “This is one of the things we never run out of in Iceland. And then I saw the news.”

The lack of cucumbers is bad news for those who want to try one of the viral recipes circulated by TikTokker Logan Moffitt, affectionately nicknamed “the cucumber guy,” which first went viral earlier this summer due to his cucumber salad mix.

“Sometimes you have to eat a whole cucumber,” the Ontario creator, 23, says in many of his videos before launching into one of his simple cooking lessons.

Moffitt’s follower count is 5.6 million, and videos of his amazing creations regularly exceed millions of views — and, apparently, cause a national shortage of the key ingredient.

“We’re literally eating it up,” 29-year-old Gudny Ljosba Hreinsdottir, who runs the Wake Up Reykjavik tour company, told The Times.

Kronan, a local grocery chain, usually grows most of its cucumbers in greenhouses, but the company told The Times that they requested an emergency shipment of produce this week to meet demand — it was sold in multiple locations.

Kronan also reported that sales for other ingredients included in typical cucumber salad recipes such as sesame oil, fish sauce and rice vinegar were up 200% since the beginning of the month. Meanwhile, Hagkaup, another local grocer, also saw sales of sesame and cucumber oil double.

“A few people can have a lot of influence,” Haflidi Halldorsson, who works in marketing for an Icelandic sheep farming company, told The Times.

Some experts are skeptical of a link between Moffitt and the cucumber shortage, believing there are other factors at play.

Kristín Linda Sveinsdóttir, director of marketing for the Horticulturists’ Sales Company, told the BBC it could be a combination of the fascination of TikTok, children going back to school and farmers replacing cucumber plants at the end of the season.

“It’s all happening at the same time,” she said, noting that if the trend had picked up earlier online, “when [cucumber] production was in full blast,” would have made a negligible difference in sales.

“This is the first time we have experienced anything like this,” she added.