Late on Thursday evening, as the manager at Matunga’s popular Classic restaurant watches over waiters serving platefuls of pav bhaji garnished with a blob of butter to seated customers, he admits business has been tough. The rise in prices of tomatoes has affected them but they haven’t increased prices on their menu. It’s raining lightly and a delightful breeze blows through the part-open restaurant with a makeshift roof for the monsoons.
Classic continues to use fresh tomatoes in its dishes, he says, sourced from Mumbai’s wholesale market in Vashi where prices hit Rs 150 per kilo, up from Rs 30 per kilo a few weeks ago. In the retail markets of Mumbai and Delhi tomatoes were being sold for Rs 160 to Rs 180 per kilo until last week. Currently prices are hovering at Rs 120 to Rs 130 per kilo, still up almost 70 percent from the usual Rs 40 per kilo price as India is gripped by a nationwide shortage of tomatoes. The shortage has been attributed to high, unseasonal rainfall in recent months which devasted the growing tomato crops and fuelled a deadly fungal disease.
As a result, most restaurants—unlike Classic—are swapping out fresh tomatoes for tomato puree or tomato paste. A 200ml packet of it, roughly equivalent to about 450gm of fresh tomatoes, is available for Rs 25 to Rs 27.
At VK Stores, a decade-old establishment in Mumbai’s bustling Crawford Market, proprietor Jenil Dedhia, who deals only in bulk items, has seen demand for 800ml packages of Austin-brand tomato puree shoot up from two per week to seven to eight per week. “We mostly cater to restaurants and hotels. Those who make items like pav bhaji, pasta etc. are using purees and pastes now. Everyone is feeling the pinch," he says.
For the next couple of months Dedhia has enough stock to cater to the rise in demand from his customers. Thereafter, he’s hoping tomato prices will normalise. “Let’s see," he says with a shrug, sounding more hopeful than certain.
Interestingly, the large, organised Horeca players, that is hotels, restaurants, and caterers, are largely insulated from the skyrocketing tomato prices. That’s because they lock in the prices of vegetables and fresh produce at an annual rate, explains Varun Khera, a Delhi-based restauranteur and Noida chapter head of the National Restaurant Association of India. The practice began almost 12 years ago when the prices of onions, a staple in Indian cooking, rose from around Rs 35 per kilo to around Rs 85 per kilo in a period of one week following excessive, unseasonal rainfall in India’s onion-producing regions.
“Since then it has been standardised practice for the bigger players to lock in the prices of vegetables at an annual rate. So presently, it’s the smaller players who procure vegetables at daily or monthly rate who are struggling," says Khera. They’re coping by switching to tomato puree and readymade gravies rather than pass on the cost to customers. “You can’t keep changing the prices on your menu. Besides things should normalise in a month or so," he says.
Households too are feeling the pinch. A middle-aged lady at Classic restaurant waiting on her pav bhaji, says she’s started using Dabur’s Homemade tomato puree brand instead of fresh tomatoes. “We use tomatoes in all our dishes. It’s just too costly now," she says.
Sales of tomato puree have surged on platforms like Amazon Fresh. “We have witnessed a 5x and 1.3x rise in demand for tomato purée and tomato ketchup, respectively on Amazon Fresh over the past few weeks. This could be due to the recent increase in tomato prices nationwide," says Srikant Sree Ram, Director, Amazon Fresh.
First Published: Jul 14, 2023, 14:27
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