“Sometimes,” the TikTok star known as “Cucumber Guy” intones at the start of his videos, “you need to eat an entire cucumber.”
Then, he starts to slice.
The influencer, Logan Moffitt, has set off a worldwide wave of chopping, pickling, and crunching by sharing viral recipes for cucumber salads prepared in a plastic deli container.
In Iceland, the virtual craze has created a real-world problem: A nationwide cucumber shortage.
Daniel Sigthorsson, 30, who lives in Reykjavik, the capital, wanted to try a salad of his own. But there were no cucumbers in his local grocery store, he said. And there were none in the second shop he visited, he said. Or the third.
“I was like, ‘That’s weird,’” he said, laughing. “That’s one of the things we never run out of in Iceland. And then I saw the news.”
Icelandic news reports blamed the social media craze for the challenges that home cooks like Mr. Sigthorsson have encountered obtaining cucumbers. The ingredient has gone missing from stores across the Nordic country, according to interviews with shoppers and tour guides, as well as data shared by Kronan, one of Iceland’s biggest grocery chains.
Kronan said cucumbers have sold out in stores across Iceland. The sales picked up so quickly that the store did not have time to prepare, said Gudrun Adalsteinsdottir, the company’s chief executive.
“We are, just literally, eating it up,” joked Gudny Ljosba Hreinsdottir, 29, who runs Wake Up Reykjavik, an Icelandic tourism company with a walking food tour..
The craze is just the latest example of a social media phenomenon disrupting food supply chains.
In 2021, a TikTok frenzy for a baked feta pasta dish stripped the cheese from the shelves of several American grocery stores. That same year, a salmon rice bowl recipe that went viral tested the supplies of Kewpie mayo. And last May, devotees of flavored water (#Watertok, for the uninitiated) went from T.J. Maxx to T.J. Maxx to search for syrups and sweeteners.
Iceland may be particularly exposed to the challenges of disruptions in its food supply.
The country prides itself on its self-sustaining agriculture: Much of its staple produce is grown in geothermal-powered greenhouses. But it is an island, isolated in the far Northern Hemisphere. If there is a shortage, importing to fill the gap can be much more expensive than it might be elsewhere in Europe.
Take Kronan. Usually, about 99 percent of its cucumbers are grown in greenhouses, Ms. Adalsteinsdottir said in an email. But this week, the company had to get an emergency shipment from the Netherlands.
The timing of the cucumber frenzy is particularly bad, said Kristin Linda Sveinsdottir, the marketing director of SFG, which represents vegetable farmers in Iceland.
Farmers grow cucumbers in cycles, and the fad hit during a small lull in the yield of the crop. There is also a slight shortage of carbon dioxide, she said, a key element of greenhouse production. And the cucumber craze comes as schools are reopening, she said, meaning their kitchens are placing bulk orders.
For evidence that the online frenzy is to blame for the scarcity, Icelanders point to the spikes in sales of other ingredients in salad recipes: At Kronan, sales of ingredients used in one of Mr. Moffit’s most popular salad recipes — sesame oil, rice vinegar and fish sauce — were up 200 percent since Aug. 5. At Hagkaup, another supermarket chain, sesame oil sales have doubled, Sigurdur Reynaldsson, the chief executive, wrote in an email.
Iceland is particularly climate conscious, and its consumers typically try to buy locally grown foods instead of imported ones to reduce their carbon footprint, Ms. Sveinsdottir said. This mentality, combined with Iceland’s small population of over 380,000 residents, means little wiggle room to handle sudden surges in demand.
“A few people can have a lot of influence,” said Haflidi Halldorsson, who works in marketing for the country’s sheep farmers.
To many, the shortage is a mild annoyance and even cause for levity. Some people in Iceland have even messaged Mr. Moffitt.
“You’ve literally created a cucumber shortage,” one person wrote to him on Instagram. (He shared a screenshot of the post with The New York Times.)
“They’re blaming you man,” another post said.
Mr. Moffit, 23, who lives in Ontario, said he noticed that three-packs of cucumbers were sold out near him when he was putting in his online grocery order. (Luckily, his mother grows cucumbers: “She keeps on giving me extras,” he said.)
Ms. Hreinsdottir, 29, is particularly tickled by an unintentional wordplay: Summer is sometimes called “gurkutid” in Iceland, which roughly translates to “The Cucumber Time.”
Usually, that means there’s nothing much on the news. But this year, the cucumbers are the news.
“Probably soon there will be a cucumber black market here,” she joked. “I mean, who knows?”
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