I work for a food-2-go supplies business, we sell packaging to coffee shops and the like. Most of our products are UK made and although we don’t directly import anything a few of our suppliers do.
An example is one 40ft container will hold about 750 cases of 500 x 12oz double walled paper coffee cups, in 2019 would cost us about 30GBP per case wholesale delivered to our UK warehouse.
To ship a 40ft container from China into the UK pre COVID was around $1500-$2000. It started rising as COVID hit (for quite a wide number of reasons all combined) and last year it was peaking at $25,000, most of the year is seemed to be about $20,000. It has dropped over the recent few months,as the article says, but is still very high.
At $2,000 shipping per 750 cases out of the £30 cost that’s about $2.66 / £2.30 per case in container shipping costs. At the peak it worked out to be about $33 / £29 per case. You can see that doubled the UK landed price of the product and so our costs rocketed up.