Fast food company McDonald’s has become the latest restaurant chain to be hit with supply problems, as it has run out of milkshakes across all of its UK outlets.
McDonald’s is also without bottled water at around 1,250 outlets across England, Wales and Scotland.
McDonald’s has blamed the shortage of milkshakes on the supply chain issues that continue to cripple the UK food sector.
Fast food rival KFC has also reported that supply chain issues resulted in some items being temporarily unavailable on its menu.
Last week Nando’s was forced to close over 40 restaurants across the UK, as it dealt with the effect of staff shortages across the chicken supply chain in the UK.
Some Nando’s staff were relocated to work in its suppliers in an effort to get the restaurants that are affected reopened.
A spokesperson for Nando’s said:
“The UK food industry has been experiencing disruption across its supply chain in recent weeks due to staff shortages and a number of our restaurants have been impacted.
“However, since Monday, a team of our brilliant Nandocas have been supporting our key suppliers onsite – working in partnership to help get things moving again, and this has already had a positive impact on affected restaurants.
“From this Saturday, as a result of the hard work behind the scenes, it is our intention that all of our restaurants will be open again, and all our customers can enjoy their favourite PERi-PERi chicken.”
Meanwhile, a campaign to recruit additional vocational driving examiners in England and Wales to help reduce the lorry driver shortage has been launched by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA).
40 new vocational examiners will be recruited in total, made up of existing DVSA employees and external candidates.
The government wrote to the UK haulage industry on July 20, 2021, outlining a package of measures to help address the lorry driver shortage.
It acknowledged that increasing the availability of vocational driving tests is key to this issue.
The DVSA has said that it continues to develop measures to maximise testing capacity, including consulting on plans to streamline the process for drivers to gain their heavy goods vehicle (HGV) licence.
The additional examiners will enable DVSA to offer more lorry driving test appointments.
It has already increased the number of vocational driving tests from 2,000 a week pre-pandemic to 3,000 by overtime and allocating additional employees into testing.