A mother of three, Netsanet Hadgu, usually buys consumer goods once a month. However, when her family goes through those goods faster than she thought, the 42-year-old widow prefers to walk to the nearby kiosk, 100 metres away from her home, to fill up her stock.

Though the recent upsurge in the cost of living has become a part of her daily routine, Nestanet's recent experience stands out. Charged 580 Br for five-litre cooking oil, she had an unpleasant argument with the storekeeper before taking the item and handing over the money.

"I bought the same product for 200 Br lower last month," Netsanet says. "How could this happen"?

The shopkeeper had an answer.

"I'm not the producer," Kemal Kemil, who claims to make a margin of up to 20 Br from five-litre of edible oil, retorted. "I just bring the item from Mercato and sell it here."

Judging by the current price volatility in the market, it appears that his argument holds water. It requires quite a lot of effort to acquire the edible oil in Mercato, where most of Ethiopia's wholesalers and retailers meet.

Unlike last year, wholesalers, deprived of accessing the item from local producers, have to wait for an average of two months to receive their orders. The market has been trying to fix itself. The large bulk of edible oil products are brought into the country through contraband routes, while very few businesses are allowed to import the product. With the removal of edible oil importers from the forex priority list by the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE), consumers like Netsanet had no choice but to get the product from local plants.

"I would be delighted to buy the oil made in Ethiopia, had it been readily available for us," says Netsanet.

Meeting demand for edible oil is a distant prospect but this is somehow in contrast to the changes seen at the production level.

The domestic capacity of producing edible oil skyrocketed nearly 800 million litres a year in only five years. It was seven million litres then. However, the supply shortfall remains a little over 50 million litres. This year, two industrial-scale edible oil plants—Phibela Industrial and WA Oil Factory—have begun production. Owned by Belayneh Kindie and Worku Aytenew, both plants are erected in Gojjam of the Amhara Regional State and claim to have consumed an aggregate investment of almost 10 billion Br.

Nonetheless, the news of inaugurations of the plants with fanfare, and the presence of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed (PhD) and Deputy Prime Minister Demeke Mekonnen, had traders and consumers wonder where their products could be found.

"I haven't even had the chance to see the newly produced edible oil," said Saleh Abdulmajid, a wholesaler in Mercato. "Let alone sell it."

If traders in Merkato, a place that takes pride in its reputation as the largest open market in Africa, could not find the oil brands from these plants, market watchers wonder what they could have missed.

Over 30 private companies and five state-owned enterprises are enlisted to distribute the palm oil produced by these plants. The plants are not encouraged by officials at the Ministry of Trade & Industry to sell their brands other than through these selected distributors. It is a bargain the managers have made with the federal government, for the preferential treatment they received when importing inputs and raw materials from abroad. The distributors can only supply consumer cooperatives.

In Addis Abeba, six distributors were shortlisted by the Ministry of Trade, with the commitment to supply 146 consumer cooperatives found in the 11 districts. They follow official guidelines based on quotas and wholesale prices set by the authorities.

The authorities intended to ease the shortage in the supply chain, hoping to fight hoarding and upward price surges in the retail market. The outcome is to the contrary, even for the cooperatives.

Yohannes Demissie serves as a board chairperson of Andinet Consumers Cooperative, which receives 55,000 litres of edible oil a month. It is hardly sufficient.

"We're able to satisfy less than a quarter of the demand," Yohannes told Fortune.