‘We have to pay more for food’: Britain’s biggest tomato farmer on the runaway costs of growing

Tomatoes grow at an APS Group farm on the Isle of Wight. Photograph: APS Group

Multiple glasshouses owned by tomato grower APS Group were left empty last year, for the first time in the business’s 80-year history.

The current shortages of tomatoes and other salad crops on British supermarket shelves have unfortunately come as no surprise to Philip Pearson, development director at the UK’s largest tomato producer.