N.L. restaurants forced to pivot as high prices sprout from lettuce shortage

The caesar salad is temporarily off the menu at Piatto Pizzeria in St. John's — despite being one of the restaurant's most popular items.

Owner Brian Vallis says the price of romaine lettuce has skyrocketed since last summer. 

"The price of the lettuce alone is $10 a head. Not to mention the pancetta, the Parmesan cheese or the caesar salad dressing and the labour," he told CBC News. 

Vallis said produce always becomes more expensive during the fall, sometimes reaching $80 or $100 for a case. This week, romaine lettuce was $220 a case.

"We're in a position now where we can't survive selling our caesars at $15 a plate."

CBC News has spoken with a dozen grocery stores, distributors and restaurants across the province struggling to obtain lettuce.

The Bagel Café, located down the street from Piatto, is having similar problems. Server Tina Fitzgerald said the restaurant isn't taking salad off the menu but has been paying high prices for the lettuce it does get.

"It's very, very, expensive. We've been putting it out in hope that it's not going to last too long."

Nearly three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, Fitzgerald said, workers in the restaurant industry are used to rolling with the punches, having dealt with changing restrictions, supply issues and staffing shortages.

Despite the high prices, staff at both restaurants say the quality isn't better — if anything, it's gotten worse. 

Chantal Dean, the owner of My Place Restaurant in Carbonear, has opted to temporarily pull most lettuce rather than raising prices — which the business has had to do twice this year already.

"It's not fair to the customer to have to pay more for it, and we can't absorb the cost — because we're a small business — and we're trying to pull ourselves out of the COVID hole."

She said the restaurant is selectively buying iceberg lettuce for $5 from the grocery store, because it's less expensive than getting it from wholesalers.

"We're using it very scarcely on a sandwich," she said.

She said the restaurant has stopped buying romaine lettuce altogether.

"When you're looking at over $10 for a head of lettuce? I mean, come on."

Drought, crop disease to blame

The lettuce shortage isn't limited to Newfoundland and Labrador, and Sylvain Charlebois, director of Dalhousie University's Agri-Food Analytics Lab, said it isn't just another symptom of inflation or the rising cost of living.

"We tend to oversimplify things," he said.

Charlebois said the shortage of lettuce in Newfoundland and Labrador is tied to drought and crop disease on the other side of the continent, in California.

"A lot of farmers didn't really have anything else to sell, and that impacted export markets, including Canada," he said.

Charlebois said the situation is temporary, and as other exporters — like Mexico and Arizona — ramp up production, prices should drop as more romaine and iceberg lettuce arrive on store shelves in December. 

"I wouldn't panic," he said.

Charlebois doesn't expect food prices to drop any time soon, but said the rate at which they're inflating should slow soon.

'I take it as good news, because for a while there, for the better part of 2022, things were out of control."

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