BREAD, milk and other staple goods have been flying off the shelves at local supermarkets this week.

One chain with branches in Malvern and Ledbury has introduced rationing to prevent its stores emptying out.

Somerfield, which has stores in Great Malvern, Barnards Green and New Street, Ledbury, says it wants to prevent panic buying.

A spokesman said: "It just isn't necessary. So to prevent it, we are limiting customers to three items of any given fresh line of produce, and six of others.

"So, you could have three bags of potatoes and six tins of beans in your trolley and that would be OK."

A Waitrose spokesman said: "We are monitoring the situation closely but it is business as usual in our stores. We are able to service all of them for the foreseeable future."

A Safeway spokesman said: "We are still delivering food to our stores and, although we have observed that in some regions staple foods like bread and milk are moving very fast, we are keeping the shelves resupplied.

"All our petrol stations were closed on Tuesday afternoon, whether they had sold out or not, to reserve supplies for the emergency services."

At Greenlink, the organic food store in Malvern, Mike Gatiss said: "It has not really been much of a problem but if it goes on another 24 hours we might be starting to hit supply problems."

The manager of the Spar supermarket in Ledbury High Street has spoken of the "panic buying" which the fuel crisis is causing among his customers.

Mike Foxton said that deliveries to the store had been normal and were likely to remain so into the weekend.

But he said that enough bread for a whole day was being sold out by 10am. A similar situation existed with milk.

He added: "The fuel crisis is not affecting us at all, other than the panic buying by the public."

He said the store was "trying to get extra deliveries of bread and milk".

But he said: "Manufacturers can't produce that much extra overnight.

Tesco spokesman Katie Jenkins said the situation was "hardly the blitz".

But at the time of going to press she said that the company only had enough fuel for deliveries for two more days.

She added: "Plenty of food is in the stores.

"Yes, there are sometimes gaps when it comes to bread and milk. People have changed their shopping patterns to save fuel and we have had a big couple of days.

"People don't want to make two trips to the shops, but it's not panic buying."