LONDON, June 26 (Reuters) – British food and drink exports fell 8.9% year-on-year in volume terms in \u200cthe first quarter of 2026, dropping to their lowest \u200clevel in a decade, excluding the height of the COVID pandemic, \u200bthe industry’s lobby said on Friday. <\/p>\n
The Food and Drink Federation, which represents over 12,000 businesses, said UK manufacturers are losing ground to global competitors and urged the government to \u200cprioritise a competitive \u2060business environment and help companies benefit from global trade agreements. <\/p>\n
\u2022 In value terms first-quarter food \u2060and drink exports fell 4.8% year-on-year to \u00a35.7 billion ($7.5 billion), the FDF said. <\/p>\n
\u2022 Food and drink imports in value terms \u200brose 2.6% \u200bto \u00a316.3 billion. <\/p>\n
\u2022 Exports to the \u200bEU fell 6.9% in \u200cvolume terms, reflecting the added cost and complexity of trading since Brexit. <\/p>\n
\u2022 Imports from the EU fell 1.0% in volume terms. <\/p>\n
\u2022 Exports to the U.S. fell 27.9% in value terms, showing the impact of additional tariffs imposed \u200cby the U.S. in 2025. <\/p>\n
\u2022 Imports \u200bfrom the U.S. rose 11.5% \u200bin value terms. <\/p>\n
\u2022 The \u200bFDF warned the UK government’s proposed tariff \u200csuspensions on products like chocolate, \u200bbiscuits and jams “risk \u200bmaking a bad situation worse”. <\/p>\n
\u2022 It warned the costs of producing food and drink in the UK, \u200bfrom energy to \u200cemployment, are higher than competitor economies, while increased \u200bregulation adds to these.($1 = 0.7602 pounds) <\/p>\n
(Reporting by James \u200bDavey; Editing by Joe Bavier) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LONDON, June 26 (Reuters) – British food and drink exports fell 8.9% year-on-year in volume terms in \u200cthe…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":662200,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,177941,56,54,55,222026,222025],"class_list":["post-662199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-food-and-drink-federation","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-value-terms","tag-volume-terms"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662199\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/662200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}