Our grocery chain has been buying rice and flour in bulk from restaurant supply houses and repackaging them in 1lb bags. Pretty agile if you ask me.
Meanwhile, my local Target is still sold out...
Smaller stores are likely more agile in this respect, because they don't need to rely on the items having bar codes and entries in their central inventory system. That's what tends to hamstring large, centralized retailers.
2669K23 is a pack of 20 (I have this sitting in my closet right now) and 2669K24 is a pack of 60. 1-3 week lead times, plan ahead.
It was very hard to get basic supplies and food when all small shops were ordered to close, and only big supermarkets were kept open, and supplied by organised convoys.
This appears to be rational at first, but it only led to people all rushing to those few supermarkets the moment the convoy arrives, and them being emptied clean by first 50 something people.
It also led to wholesale bases being emptied by supermarkets, as they have the biggest buying power, and biggest truck fleets. Here, I heard that they went through more than 8 months supply of flour in just few weeks.
The situation got much better when small shops were let to open.
Both supermarkets, and wholesalers are of course very happy with that, but that left near nothing for small shops when they reopened.
But in smaller towns in North America it's getting rarer and rarer to see even an independent butchery, let alone veggie market or bakery.
At least one restaurant chain already is:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/neighborhood/tomball/busine...
At least 2 restaraunts in my town do this. Order online, drive around beck (sometimes with a line of cars, but never more than a 5 minute wait), and they drop your food/tp/etc in the trunk. Much better than hitting up Safeway or Costco, and not really much more expensive.
Wait, they didn't place restrictions on how many items individual customers could buy?
> Wait, they didn't place restrictions on how many items individual customers could buy?
Barely did, and even when it was enforced, this didn't prevent panickers reliably rushing to supermarket all and every time the truck arrived to buy full bag of food, or two. People were literally running after that truck.
And the more people see that, the more people do that.
Even switching to food stamps wasn't able to stop that entirely until they got the trick with small shops.
That was a very foolish thing to do just for a few thousand dollars
The very same situation was happening in some cities in China in first weeks of quarantine, before they also realised that.
After some reading, I realises that this did happen during great lot of modern day famines around the world. "Throwing food off the truck" seems to be a really counterproductive way to distribute food, because of it facilitating overconsumption by the few.
Please don't characterize buying a bag (or two) of food as panicking.
That is less than an ordinary amount of shopping at a time for me during times when there isn't a public health order to avoid going out. And I'm not shopping for half as many people as some people are.
Characterizing the reasonable and prudent behaviors, directly driven by the advice of public health officials as "panic" because it is exposing supply chain limitations is extremely harmful.
Even for a family of 4, this should last at least 3-4 days of comfortable living.
Those people there were buying that much food daily. I do remember their faces.
Anyway, in addition to making pretty good money as working the desk as a lab consultant if people had any questions and to just keep an eye on things, I sold individual floppy disks. I don't remember the numbers but basically I could place a bulk 100 diskette order for maybe a tenth the price that individual diskettes were sold for in the campus store. It was a nice profitable little side gig that took almost zero effort.
I haven't seen that yet, but at least one grocery chain in my area was offering 25 lb bags of flour for sale about a month ago (or maybe they were 40-50 lb bags).
Haven't been back since to that store since to see if they're still doing it (been slowly rotating through the four we visit regularly), but flour has been available in 5lb bags so long as you're not too picky about the brand or type
I've been baking cakes since I was about 13 and I have never used anything other than AP flour. OK. I've used bread flour in a pinch, being super-careful to mix it very little because of the high protein content.
Pasta: roll it out thin and cut with a knife. It really doesn't take that much longer. I did it like this forever until I got a pasta roller/cutter.
Not trying to be contrarian, but I felt to point out that nothing here is a show stopper, it just takes a little creativity/experience.
Realized yeaast wasn't to be had for love or mone:
https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/103845407941910287
Starter recipe:
https://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/sourdough-starter-re...
Took about 6 days to get going. 3rd loaf was a winner. Feedback from household and neighbours is strongly positive as well.
Flour sourcing has been spotty, but even that has upsides: testing out spelt and einkorn, along with whole wheat, AP, and (blech) bleached flour.
Loaves, rolls, pizza, crumpets, and more.
Most of this based of Youtube videos:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=BJEHsvW2J6M
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2FVfJTGpXnU
Dutch oven, food scale, bench knife (I use a plastering spatula) highly recommended.
Spelt was a buy where other flours were cleared out at a natural food store. Last whole wheat was a half-kilo bag. I'll hit numerous stores, early in the day. Buy what's available though AP / whole wheat / specialty by preference.
Gourmet / natural food stores have tended to better selections. Ethnic food aisles often have flour where main selection is out, or specialty flours regardless.
Whole grains are also available. I've contemplated buying a mill.
As in a business or the machinery to use at home?
Ironically, the KitchenAid I'd always coveted has proved all but wholly unnecessary for breadmaking, though the milling attachmnent is among the options available.
And, FWIW, I'm experimenting broadly with grains and augmentations.
Today's batch was 1000g flour (50% AP, 25% spelt, 20% WW (last of the bag), 5% einkorn), 25g salt, 80% hydration, 200g walnut pieces, 100g mixed whole spelt & eincorn grains (boiled. in salted water). OMFGood.
I've started a straight bleached white flour batch, basically to see what the worst possible flour might be.
Basically: experiment, see what happens.
Yeast is still available online: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HST626C/
> cakes aren’t very good with all purpose flour
We only stock all-purpose, and there are a lot of great cakes you can make with it. Here's one I make a lot: https://www.jefftk.com/recipes/choccake
Before organizing this, we had already gone through about 30lb since we started staying in (https://www.jefftk.com/p/stepping-up-isolation)