A saucy drama: Mustard shortage fuels gossip, panic in France

Supply chain issues, extreme weather keep the beloved condiment from reaching country’s grocery shelves

PARIS — It was the local egg delivery man who spread the spiciest gossip about the mustard shortage.

Someone in a small French town had found a way to buy two jars at the grocery store — despite the one-mustard cap imposed by many shops as the country faces a shortage of its beloved condiment.

“The audacity!” said Claire Dinhut, who heard about the local mustard scandal from the egg courier while at her family home south of Tours, in west-central France, as she shared the “town drama” in a TikTok video that has been viewed more than 600,000 times. How the mustard bandit did it: He left the store with one jar, and sneaked back in for a second by checking out with a different salesperson.

Just as summer barbecues — and extra demand for the tangy condiment — reach their peak, France is in the throes of a weeks-long shortage of mustard.

For some, it feels dire — a personal consequence of extreme weather that decimated mustard seed supply in and outside France, and the supply chain disruptions still reverberating around the globe as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. The shortage is sparking calls to bring home the production of mustard seeds to rely less on other countries.

The Washington Post visited four grocery stores in western Paris this week that either had no mustard for sale or were out of two common mustard brands — Maille and Amora, which are part of the same company owned by Unilever.

“I haven’t had mustard in three months. You won’t find any [elsewhere either],” said Hassan Talbi, owner of a bodega on Rue de Courcelles. Talbi says his supplier, French retailer Carrefour, sent him one shipment of mustard jars about two months ago — and since then, nothing. No word on when he might get more.

Mustard is a staple of most French diets — adding a kick to fries and sandwiches — and a key ingredient in iconic dishes like steak tartare. It’s also a source of national pride: The production of mustard was regulated in France as early as the Middle Ages, and the world-famous Dijon mustard comes from the Burgundy region. While historians say mustard wasn’t invented in France, many French people claim it as their own.

“This is a sauce that’s loved all over the world — and it’s ours,” Dinhut told the Post.

Yet despite being the largest consumer of mustard worldwide, France only has about 11,000 acres of mustard seed crops — the bulk of it in Burgundy, home to the city of Dijon.

Droughts and heat waves that occurred last year in Canada — the source of roughly 80 percent of France’s mustard seed imports — severely disrupted global supply. Containers to transport foodstuffs are hard to come by, and the high cost of fuel has made shipping costs skyrocket. French producers say mustard seed-eating insects, which thrive in warmer temperatures, are also foiling crops.

All this has caused some serious soul-searching among farmers and French mustard lovers about how they got to this point. The shortage could be “a tremendous accelerator” for the industry to repatriate production of mustard seeds, Paul-Olivier Claudepierre, co-owner of Martin-Pouret, a French agri-food business, told French newspaper Le Monde.

People are also blaming the mustard hoarders: French people who read about the shortage and decided to stock up on extra mustard may be fueling the problem, producers say.

On TikTok, French people have posted instructions on how to make mustard at home. Conspiracy theories also abound online, with some users sharing videos purporting to show stockpiles of mustard in supermarket warehouses, and speculating companies have been hoarding the condiment to artificially drive up prices. Those videos have been debunked, and retailers like Carrefour have said they are getting mustard onto shelves as quickly as possible.

Hubert Guillaume and Naël Bernard, who work in Paris at a Monoprix, a supermarket chain, said they were relieved when they got a shipment of mustard last week — after a month without. “People came in droves to ask us and there was nothing,” said Guillaume. Some would come every day, Bernard said, hoping mustard had arrived. Every day, he had to turn them away.

This is quite literally, the talk of the town. Where Dinhut’s dad lives in west-central France — and in other small towns just like it — “If you’re checking out at a grocery store for example, you’re like ‘Ah, still no mustard!’ It’s like talking about the weather,” she said.