Castlemaine’s Blue Sea Fish Shop owner Chris Dimopoulos went viral on social media platform TikTok last week when he shared a video slamming McDonald’s for stealing all the potatoes, leaving none for every ‘mum and dad’ shop in Australia. The video had over 300,000 views in less than 24 hours, making Chris an instant celebrity.
“I didn’t expect it to get so big,” Chris told the Mail.
The TikTok shows Chris, who took over the family business in 2019, doing some quick sums to calculate McDonald’s rate of potato cake sales.
“If you’ve got 990 odd Macca’s stores in Australia with 1.7 million customers a day and if you’re selling one potato cake to every 10 customers that’s 170,000 potato cakes you’re selling every single day,” Chris stated.
“Every fish shop I know around here is struggling to get chips, potatoes, and potato cakes.
“Bloody hell we’ve just gone through dim sims, cabbage, every other shortage, lettuce shortage, and now we’re going to run into a chip shortage. And Macca’s is bringing out potato cakes and stealing all the bloody potato cakes, stealing all the potatoes – the same potatoes we use for chips.”
The video had surpassed one million views and received well over 70,000 likes over the course of the week, with an enormous number of comments in support of small businesses, with many commentators stating that fish and chip shop potato cakes are far superior.
The Dimopoulos family first purchased the local store back in 1986. Aside from a decade-long absence the family has been providing fish n chips to the local community for 27 years and has become a household name thanks in part to their handmade potato cakes.
“We make 400-600 potato cakes ourselves every morning,” Chris said.
So what’s behind this latest food shortage? It appears the recent cold weather and subsequent frosts are causing potatoes to produce extra sugar impacting growth. An increase in production costs is also hiking the prices of the much sought-after vegetable.
Victoria has been one of the hardest hit by the latest supply crisis, with other states not far behind. Unfortunately, due to a hot summer in Europe, importing the starchy vegetable appears to be untenable, so it might be worth switching to the good old sweet potato chip for the time being.
