‘Worse than Covid-19 pandemic’: Local food manufacturers on fallout from Middle East energy crisis

SINGAPORE – For soya sauce maker Thomas Pek, the fallout from the Middle East energy crisis has hit local manufacturers here in a far more painful way than recent crises, including the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only have the costs of his soya sauce bottles and bottle caps skyrocketed since oil supply disruptions wrought havoc on prices of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) resin – a key material for plastic bottles that is made from crude oil – but his production costs and transportation costs have also surged on higher diesel prices. “During the pandemic, our costs did not increase so much. Back…