Post Brexit bureaucracy bites British store in Brussels

  • Date: 12-Feb-2021
  • Source: Euronews
  • Sector:Economy
  • Country:Middle East
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Post Brexit bureaucracy bites British store in Brussels

If you were born and raised in the UK or Ireland, but are now based in Brussels, doing your food shop at the family run supermarket Stonemanor is like a trip down memory lane. From custard creams to maple syrup, it transports you right back to your kitchen table back home. So when Stonemanor took to Facebook last week to tell their customers that they had to close their doors for a few days due to empty shelves, the news caused an uproar among British expats in Brussels as well as Belgians who had grown to love their products since the store was founded in 1982.Normally, at this time of year, the shelves would be bursting with Easter eggs, but since the EU-UK transitional agreement ended in December, getting goods into Belgium got complicated.‘There are 250 different product categories that will require 250 different types of paperwork that will need to be submitted to the customs', store manager Ryan Pearce tells Euronews in front of a stack of empty shelves. The shop, that stocks everything from baked beans to British beds is full of empty fridges, even though the biggest attraction for regulars are normally the chilled goods like