Thousand-year-old mill has resumed production due to demand for flour | Hacker News Reader

Thousand-year-old mill has resumed production due to demand for flour

foodandwine.com

241 pointsrmason213 comments

This crisis has had an energizing effect not only on thousand year old mills but startups as well.

So there's a Michigan startup that makes... bamboo toilet paper. I don't know what kind of demand there is for bamboo toilet paper. A week after toilet paper became unavailable at any price they got a story written about them. They were having a warehouse sale where you could pick it up at the plant.

https://heybippy.com/

The next day the paper had a picture of a woman in a brand new Mercedes full to the brim. She couldn't see out of the back window, the passenger seat was full and she had some on her lap! Now apparently they're selling it as fast as they can make it as long as their bamboo supply holds.

I know someone whom I believe is an investor and I will check in with them later this summer. I am curious once the shortage is over and the supermarkets are stacked to the ceiling with Charmin will they still have a business?

Will people develop a fondness for bamboo toilet paper? If they do that founder will have the pandemic to thank.

TP is a bit unexpected. The local store got bamboo paper towels which supposedly can be washed and reused multiple times. That advantage would still be there even after pandemic. Probably they can always pivot from TP to towels.

Wrt. the original article - cool, the [cold] stone grounded flour is better then the industrial fast (and importantly - hot) crush which thus affects the floor's carbohydrates state (and resulting yeast action, etc.).

You're supposed to wipe your butt with these and then wash the dirty cloth? Why on Earth would I do that? Am I supposed to be saving money with this or something?

Paper towels aren’t for your butt. They’re for wiping up things in the kitchen, your floor, dust, etc.

Oh paper towels! Not toilet paper. Oops, my mistake! I guess I had that on my mind. Yeah, I've actually owned some of those wash and use paper towels. They're pretty decent.

Mistake... or new startup idea! Re-usable bamboo toilet paper.

Cloth diapers are a thing, too.

That doesn't immediately sound good. E.g., baby wipes thrown in the toilet will clog the sewage pumps and break them. If bamboo toilet paper works the same way, you'll have a big issue!

I wonder what these bamboo paper products are actually made of. Because bamboo fabric is actually rayon and may not be great for the environment. A better comparison would be with normal washable cloths.

Bamboo fabrics can be made that are not rayon, but they are significantly more time and energy consuming and thus far more expensive.

Marketing rayon as bamboo in the US is a labeling violation enforced by the FTC.

I had to search out one of these TP startups in order to find any. My house is in full isolation mode: not trips to supermarkets, we piece together our grocery shopping from multiple online options since most are out of stock on at least 1/3 of our orders, and shopping online like this we can never get any toilet paper. None at all.

So about 4 weeks ago I orders from gono2. They aren't taking more subscriptions, but will allow one-off pre-orders for when they have stock. I have an order coming in about 2 weeks, and we hopefully have just enough to make it til then. If not, we have baby wipes for our young'un in diapers that will see us through.

why are you in full isolation?

High risk, and live in proximity to large outbreaks.

My backup plan for TP is to turn to old towels and rags. In the Middle Ages the rich used scraps of linen, so that’s the plan. Just don’t flush.

Why not a bidet? I'm surprised more people dont nuke TP completrly.

If I had a different house I would. The bidet needs power in vicinity of the toilet. There is no good outlet near the toilet. Don’t want an electrician in the house for the time being.

I don't recall the brand, but bamboo toilet paper was the last to disappear from the shelves last month.

Tangential: The mill a mile up the road from my house was was listed in the Doomsday Book in 1089AD (though has likely burnt down a few times.) And when "attached" the local cathedral it produced the original hot crossed buns. It was printed in a visitor centre leaflet so it must be true.

Domesday

.. yeah. Thanks autocorrect/HN edit lockout. Grumble.

I had no idea about the businesses that are part of this word until we had to start hunting for bread flour and ended up finding:
1/ our city has an industrial wheat varietal breeder that makes a novel new brand based on Paragon,
2/ it also happens to be grown on an organic farm just west of us,
3/ and is milled and distributed by a nationwide famous windmill about 20 minutes to the north east.
It’s a whole little world of actually quite new tech in the area I had no idea existed, with this weird overlap with technology hundreds and thousands of years old.

I wish there were a commerce directory that would enable search and discovery for local businesses like this.

Something printed on yellow paper, maybe!

You jest, the yellow pages online are a travesty of interface woes, but I guess I was able to enter flour and a number of companies did come up.
But I think they are missing out on listings for products, resource, or manufacturing inputs & waste connecting angle that would be really interesting. The best thing they have is maybe industry category keywords.

The entire business model of the Yellow Pages is to sell entries to businesses, and any value you get out of that is (at least) secondary. It's basically a gym subscription model, except its hosting costs and transit that eat into their profits. Just like the most profitable way to run a gym is to sell subscriptions to people who never visit.

Not sure that's quite the right model. Everyone can pile into looking up entries in the yellow pages online, and the more people find businesses, the more value the yp has in it's base product vs the costs of buying an entry.
The more people pile into a gym there becomes a point of declining value because you can't get on a machine and the room gets stuffier, conditions worsen.
I think not finding other value enhancing propositions for the yellow pages is mostly about brand stagnation.

>the more people find businesses, the more value the yp has in it's base product vs the costs of buying an entry.
I'm not sure this is true. Zero marginal cost for usage does not create an opportunity for profit. How could it? Selling ads for your pages filled with ads?

Not long after I started consulting, I had to get a D&B account. I don't remember why. But not long after, I was spammed by Yellow Pages. And it went on for many years. Maybe I was short sighted, but I couldn't imagine it being useful for a litigation consultant.

Thomas Register perhaps? https://www.thomasnet.com/

Instagram unlocked a lot of stuff here, though tbh it was mostly chatting with people on insta messaging rather than any kind of open discovery.

Which city is this? I'd read this article/blog post...

So much flour will sit in people’s pantry and go bad, never opened.

Based on...? It may do nothing but drive down future demand as people use up what they have.

The reality that many people buying it don't know how to cook, let alone bake. I'd bet that most of the people clearing out the baking aisles are doing so as an insurance policy (i.e. buy the raw materials now 'just in case' and learn how to use them later, if needed. Maybe, if they have kids they're baking some cookies.) The crisis will pass with the majority of the flour purchased just going bad.
Regarding driving down future demand: not likely more than in the very short term... flour has a fairly short shelf life. Have you ever used/tasted rancid flour? While it's not the end of the world, it's not something most people are likely to want use in a recipe more than once given a choice.

> The reality that many people buying it don't know how to cook, let alone bake.
Based on?
> not likely
Again, based on what? Your intuition? You have some data correlating flour purchases with people unable to bake (and apparently unmotivated to use a search engine or read expiration dates)?
Storing flour in a sealed container extends its lifespan. Freezing it even more so. Anyone can easily learn these facts if so motivated.

Based on a lifetime of anecdotal evidence and the application of logic and common sense. Not everything in this world requires citing references and applying the scientific method.

Is a pig's ass pork? Is the Pope Catholic? Does a bear shit in the woods? Gonna need some data and studies to back that up...

I really think there's a lot of stuff easier to prepare and of much better nutritional value you can put in a freezer (which generally only works until power runs out). But hey, let's buy 100lbs of flour and put it in a freezer because we can do that....

Baking is not some arcane skill. It's literally just instruction following. First time I baked it sucked. Second time it was great. The separation between the two was hours not weeks or months.
Listen, I don't want to over-generalize but I've seen this on the Internet about the most mundane of skills: cooking, baking, doing your taxes. They're all just instruction-following. Sure the upper limit on the skill level is high but basic competence to get a usable product on all of them is like at the level a twelve-year-old could do it if they had the motor skills.

Necessity is forcing many people to learn how to cook, bake, garden, clean, cut hair, etc.

Let alone bake? If you have a recipe that lists weights, which is easy to get, then it's pretty difficult to screw up baking.

OP here. based on me owning a cookie company that makes thousands of cookies a week and being plugged-in because it's my industry. I ask people. many haven't used flour they've bought yet.
There are lots of people using flour who didn't before, but lots of it is going to go to waste.

It can be stored in the freezer.

If I were hoarding food, flour would be just about the last thing that I would devote freezer space to...

Or any other cool dry place that is safe from insects.
I’m keeping my freezer space for the stuff that actually goes bad.

And moisture. Some of the molds that can grow on flour are carcinogenic and/or extremely toxic.

Cool dry place ;)
But ya, aflatoxins are nothing to mess around with.

TIL: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aflatoxin

One of the most terrifying stories I've heard is about some friends of my grandparents. The mother would cook bread, every day, for the family. She did this for years. Eventually, the dad became ill and died of cancer, then the mother, then the rest of the family. It was traced to some of these molds in the flour some time before the last one passed.
I also make bread, and you can be sure that I keep it in a dry place and make sure it smells fresh whenever I use it, even though I have no idea if moldy flour has a smell.

That is my worry as well. people who are used to eating out have now bought a lot of grains and flour. they would just sit in their pantries when they start eating out again. ironically, those who eat out would not be able to estimate what they need. the poor would be paying for the ensuing shortage unfortunately.

A lot of people I know are getting into baking their own bread right now. Sourdough seems to be particularly popular. I would guess that most people are buying the flour to use it, not to hoard it.

I thought this when I realized just how much flour was in the 25 lb bag I bought, but if you make a habit of baking even once a week, you end up going through it pretty quickly.

My wife and I have gone through more flour in the last two months than we have in the past five years. We've probably used 20 lbs of it, already.
Edit: We, of course, could not find any at the groceries, as of a few weeks ago. So, instead of buying two ten-pound bags, since none were available, we went to a restaurant supply store, to buy a fifty-pound bag... There were no lines, no shortage of product on the shelves, and if they sold it in smaller portions, we would have happily bought less.
On the bright side, we are now a strategic flour reserve for our friends and relatives.

If you're buying in industrial portions, you should consider freezing it in batches to kill any weevil eggs.
The larger of a batch you have, the more likely there are eggs in there. Most bakers, pizzerias, etc. will use the flour fast enough that they won't hatch, but a home baker might not be so lucky...
https://www.thespruceeats.com/how-to-store-flour-1389337

That's the thing though, at least here there is no general shortage of flour, but there is a shortage of small 1-kg packages, while the demand for large bags has gone down. Some local bakeries made their own smaller batches for sale as a result.

Exactly. My usual weekly recipe uses about 850-900 grams of flour, so I go through a 25 pound bag every 3 months or so. This has been roughly consistent for the past 2 years.

As someone who does bake bread every week, this has been super annoying. It is true that more people are taking up baking, but a lot of this is panic buying. My 30-40 year old friends have all admitted that they immediately purchased 2 bags of flour that remain unopened. Bakeries remain open and supermarket bread aisles are full. Most people with young kids have not suddenly started baking bread everyday.

I am like you - under normal circumstances flour is a staple, although I cheat by using a bread making machine. I don't have a car and flour plus a machine means I can have fresh bread, not stale bought stuff. Normally I buy 3kg at most in a week with a stockpile of less than that. So the current situation is annoying.
However, think of the OCD crew that are normally the only ones buying hand sanitizer. Us flour buyers can improvise with store bread but the OCD people must have had it hard when their essentials of hand sanitizer and toilet paper vanished from the aisles.

I’m not “one of the OCD crew”, but I have been making hand sanitizer for distribution locally. I bought a bunch of aloe gel online in late January, and picked up several gallons of Everclear (190 proof grain alcohol) locally.

Yeah. At my local grocery stores, there's never been any material shortage of bread. There hasn't even really been a lack of choice from mass market stuff to what at least passes for artisanal by supermarket standards. I have been baking (more than usual) at home but there's no shortage of breadstuffs in the supermarket if you'd rather buy. (TBH, bread has been more consistently in-stock than a lot of product categories.)

The preparations are unnecessary until they suddenly aren't. If you wait until bakeries close and supermarket bread aisles are empty, then it's too late.
This is like having backups and disaster recovery in IT. You spend resources on it, but get nothing in return. That one time things do go wrong though it can literally save your business and you'll be happy to have had backups and recovery in place.
I think that people's fears of a lack of food in first world countries are overblown, but people are still afraid.

While I agree with you about the necessity, I don't think people are really doing much to actually solve a potential problem either. If we really get to the point that bakeries and supermarkets are out of bread and other reasonably convenient staples, you having bought flour in a moment of panic is of little comfort. There's more to the equation, and generally I feel that if people weren't comfortably ready for this 2 years ago, they won't be remotely ready in 2 days.
So let's say things have collapsed to the point that all the bakeries or supply chains leading to you are now out of commission. It's time to bake bread and you have flour. Do you have yeast and other ingredients already? They're already in shortages too. Is your water service and electricity / gas still working? Do you have experience baking bread, or access to a recipe book, or is your Internet service provider still operating? Okay - let's say the bread supply has collapsed completely and all of these things are still working out for you - great - you can bake some bread! But honestly, even that's pretty lucky. You might be eating cold gruel with water from the creek, if you even know that's a thing.
But wait! There's more! All the supply chains near you have just collapsed. Everyone's going hungry once they've gone through their 2 (or 0) bags of flour. Is your house about to be looted? Can you secure it? Are the phones and police dispatch still working? Do you have anything else to eat with your week's supply of bread? Are you even emotionally prepared for what life is like now if things are getting this bad and you just now decided to have some extra flour on hand? Wait - is that a fever and non-productive cough you're starting to feel? What are you wiping your ass with!?
If all you have in mind is last-minute hoarding of a few staples, you're contributing to a wider short-term problem and your staples won't keep you sane and healthy very long. If you're bored in quarantine, now's a good time to start planning to be more prepared and self-sufficient for the next event.

There's a point in between things blowing over and civilization collapsing. It's the point where most people will survive (if uncomfortably), but some people will starve. Perhaps because of a larger (but localized) shortage, perhaps because they'll get priced out. Some people, but not enough to cause the entire society to self-destruct. You want to make sure you and your loved ones don't become a part of this group, if it's avoidable.

You don't need yeast. You can bake things with flour and baking powder. In fact, with bananas, flour, baking powder, cinnamon, sugar, and butter you can have banana bread that's just fine.

Yeast is far, far easier to keep around than bananas though. Honestly, I'm not trying to be mean, but if we are talking supply-chain shortages, bananas are the worst suggestion. They don't last long at all, and rely on being transported vast distances.
Cinnamon is also not the best suggestion- there is a very good reason spices were considered a luxury, as they aren't truly necessary and rely on being transported long distances.
Baking powder is a reasonable suggestion, as it stores essentially indefinitely. Making it is theoretically possible, but it isn't a project I'd recommend for an inexperienced chemist. Although if things are at that point, bread likely won't be your highest priority.
Sourdough would be a viable suggestion, there is a reason the miners in the Yukon gold rush used it. It can be made with ingredients that can be locally sourced/grown nearly anywhere. However, it does rely on refrigeration.

Sure, sure, but you can just freeze applesauce or the bananas. It'll last ages. It'll definitely outlast any temporary supply chain stall. Cinnamon lasts forever too, and it's very compact powdered. I have like half a kilogram and I don't even bake that often.
Truly thing you can make quick breads pretty easily and without any work at all and the goods for it will last ages. Even flour.
Actually, the modern freezer will keep you safe and secure for ages.
All you need is electricity and you can outlast any temporary supply chain stall with this stuff. People buying flour are perfectly fine.
It's okay to be annoyed that people are making it hard to practise your hobby. Just sounds silly when folks try to make it out to be some irrational thing that other people are trying things.

I wasn't trying to hate on quickbreads- banana bread is too good of a dessert to throw shade at. It just doesn't strike me as something particularly practical in a discussion of supply chain shortages.
To be fair, I was coming from the viewpoint of not being able to find things long-term and using what you can grow and source locally, but that isnt practical for people who live in cities.

We're still missing my original point: the kind of people who rush out and buy 2 bags of flour at the last minute and have otherwise not prepared to be self-sufficient for more than a couple of meals? They absolutely have not frozen a stockpile of bananas to use when yeast is scarce.

As far as I know there's no shortage of bananas. My local Safeway has loads. Just got some yesterday.

You're still missing the point of what I'm saying.

You're not wrong at all. I joke with my friends that I'm "buying stocks for the future: canned goods and ammunition". I'm by no means an "End Of The World Prepper", but your series of questions are exactly the kinds of questions I like to be able to answer in a doesn't-sound-too-crazy-way:
> Do you have yeast and other ingredients already?
Yup.
> Is your water service and electricity / gas still working?
We've got two camping jugs full of water that we keep full (20 gal each?) and change the water out of at least every 6 months. In the summer they're drinking water for the cabin, in the winter they're for emergencies.
I've got a 3kW generator that I use for field work, and a 30L jug of fresh gas. It gets used in the field all summer and tucked away in the winter.
> Do you have experience baking bread?
It's fun!
> Or access to a recipe book?
Stored locally on my computer, and the favourite recipes are written on recipe cards because I'm scared to get water in my laptop or iPad in the kitchen :)
> or is your Internet service provider still operating?
That's probably the trickiest of all of them. If both the cell network and the coax network go down here, we've lost communication other than the short-range 2m ham kit (also a hobby)
> You might be eating cold gruel with water from the creek, if you even know that's a thing.
For the first while, at least it's going to be hot gruel. My portable hiking stove and pot are nearby along with the sleeping bags and tent. Because I like camping :). I am going to go look up a gruel recipe here though!
> But wait! There's more! All the supply chains near you have just collapsed. Everyone's going hungry once they've gone through their 2 (or 0) bags of flour. Is your house about to be looted? Can you secure it?
Secure it permanently? No, probably not. Secure it well enough that looters would go elsewhere for the time being? Yup. At that point we'd be packing up to get out of dodge and head to the cabin or farm.
> Are the phones and police dispatch still working?
That definitely seems like a weak link. Around here there's been a huge push to move all of the existing copper landlines to fibre or coax, with battery backups in peoples' houses.
> Do you have anything else to eat with your week's supply of bread?
Kraft Dinner, canned chilli, and a bunch of home-canned vegetables (it's fun!).
Longer term, it's going to depend quite a bit on what time of the year it is. There's a root cellar at the family farm that is full at the end of harvest, and there's fresh veggies all summer. I've got about 80 rounds of .308 (I hunt, it's fun!) for big game, about 100 12ga birdshot rounds, and about a bazillion rounds of .22LR for smaller game. Father-in-law has a grain bin full of lentils I think, although I don't know if there's any specific processing that needs to happen between harvest and "ready to eat".
> Are you even emotionally prepared for what life is like now if things are getting this bad and you just now decided to have some extra flour on hand?
That's... hard to tell. In this scenario with riots and looting, we know where we'd run to, and I think we'd be fine for a while when we get there, but I'm not sure either of us are ruthless enough to actually make it there if shit is really bad.
> Wait - is that a fever and non-productive cough you're starting to feel?
That's definitely a wildcard in all of it too. The area around our "out of town" spot does have a small primary care clinic, but no intensive care facilities. Might be able to find compressed oxygen and a nasal cannula, but need a ventilator? GL;HF.
> What are you wiping your ass with!?
Old socks :D. More seriously though... I should pick up a jug of lye crystals next time I'm at the hardware store. Making soap from scratch is fun too! (although I'd rather make it from pre-extracted vegetable oil and lye crystals than rendered animal fat and lye extracted from wood ash)

You got a lot of things figured out here. A lot of it looks fun, too. Let me help you with an easy one:
"because I'm scared to get water in my laptop or iPad in the kitchen"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQ0_HDJkatY
They were pretty affordable on eBay when I last checked. :)

That's amazing :D
I thought the whole rugged laptop thing was a bit hokey for a while, and then I watched a local telco guy set his Toughbook down to tie his boot. He forgot to pick it back up and backed over it with his van. Jumped out, terrified. Opened it up and you could just watch the tension release as it woke up from sleep and worked fine.
And just in case you think I'm a terrible person for sitting back and watching... I was trying to get to him, but he didn't hear me yell and backed up before I got to him :)

As a Toughbook owner since the Pentium-90 days, they're a mixed bag. Everything you hear about them is true. I've shot up some old ones to see what calibers they'll withstand (.22 and birdshot, not much else), and I've used them in the rain, dropped them down stairs, launched rockets off one when I forgot the pad and didn't want to make another trip back home...
...but what you don't hear is all the annoying stuff. At least the old ones had super lame BIOS functionality, perhaps intended for a corporate environment where allowing the user to boot from USB (and this reinstall their OS) was actually a bad thing. The keyboards range from "mediocre" to "godawful". They're at least a generation behind in pretty much everything, and about 4 generations behind in max RAM capacity, for some reason. Since RAM tends to bottleneck my usage long before CPU, that means they become irrelevant a lot sooner than a Thinkpad with the same CPU, for instance.
And of course, the metal shell means that RF is tricky. They do all sorts of tricks to get the wifi signal out, with antennas inside plastic pods on the sides and stuff, but it's always a game of compromises.
Know that going in, and you can be very happy with a used Toughbook. I would have to be spending someone else's money to buy a new one.

Heh, conveniently the field work is generally funded with someone else’s money :D
Thanks for the heads up! I’m not sure what we’ll settle on exactly yet, but it’s not going to be my personal laptop that I’m bringing out into farmers’ fields this year!

> I think that people's fears of a lack of food in first world countries are overblown, but people are still afraid.
I'd love to think that, but as I follow supply chain news these days, it dawns on me that economy is surprisingly complicated. Just as a random example from today, I wouldn't ever think that there may be issues in food production in the US because of shortage of carbon dioxide, ultimately caused by ethanol manufacturing shutting down, which is tied to all the oil being dumped on the market. Or another example, shortages of flour and yeast in stores were not caused by the shortage of actual product, but of commercial-sized packaging.
I like to think that my region will be fine, food-wise. But I worry that some non-obvious links in the food supply chain get broken and the situation will rapidly deteriorate. So even as we bake our own bread and pizzas now, I'm slowly increasing the supply of flour anyway (among other foodstuffs).

This fragility is a result of an intentional trend - lean supply chains. To cut capital tied up in inventory, manufacturing and retail businesses have worked very hard to remove warehouses full of inputs and finished products from their supply chains. Unfortunately, those inefficiencies had the secondary function of a buffer in case of disruptions, which means the lag between the disruption and its consequences has gotten shorter.
(The two functions are closely related, in that pre-lean manufacturing had all kinds of disruptions occur all the time, meaning their supply chains were essentially under constant low-grade stress tests. Lean logistics has been in part a massive effort to get rid of those unnecessary disruptions.)

Do you not grasp that having flour around provides optionality that your friends didn't previously have?

Yes, but there's a tragedy of the commons effect here.

yeah i feel you. we bake thousand of cookies a week and its been a head ache working with suppliers. same for eggs. basically anything a bakery need.

Particularly since it is really hard to find yeast for sale.

Drink Weissbier and harvest it yourself from the bottom of the bottles.

You can raise your own yeast + bacteria mix by following a recipe for making starter. As long as you wash your hands well before working with it, and are willing to wait a few weeks for it to establish, it's difficult to screw it up.

.. or just ask on Nextdoor or similar. since part of maintaining a starter is discarding some on the regular, people are frequently more than happy to leave their discard in a bag on the front stoop for you to pick up

Weeks? I've made starters from scratch in the space of 3 to 4 days. One way to speed it up is to stir in a teaspoon of (good quality) honey, since honey is naturally full of wild yeasts.

Isn't honey pasteurized?

I go the whole wheat route (hard red mostly) and that keeps in a sealed container nearly forever. I have had good luck with regular flour simply by keeping it in an old glass canister set. Honey of course keeps just fine when kept out of the light and also sealed.
many people let the humidity in their homes get too high and don't transfer some baking products to more appropriate containers than the simple paper bags mass packaging uses.

I personally bought 200 lbs of flour from a mill (they only sold 50 lb bags, and I needed a couple of different types of flour to do the different baking projects I wanted to do).
Each bag was around $30. With shipping and handling, the grand total came to around $200 total.
I've already made 6 pizzas, 8 loaves of sourdough bread, 3 cakes, and 4 batches of cookies. I've been baking about two new loaves of sourdough every week.
When you consider that a single pizza order for delivery typically costs around $30 after tip and your typical artisanal bread loaf at the store is around $5, my flour has already paid for itself, and I still have months of flour left (assuming I keep baking 2 loaves every week).
I would agree with you, though. Many people probably aren't actually using their flour and baking goods they have been hoarding (beyond making a couple of things).
For me, though, baking has essentially turned into my hobby.
$200 to fund an entire hobby that will keep me entertained (and and my little family fed) for months? Not the worst $200 I have spent, that's for sure.

Heh, it's funny. I haven't baked nearly as much as you have during the lockdown, but it's been surprising! I admittedly panic bought a few things (e.g. rice and flour) but now that my wife and I have a bunch of time on our hands, we've been going through both of them at a pretty solid clip. What I thought was "excessive flour" is starting to run out, and we keep finding new stir fries and curries to cook together to eat with rice. Overall food bills have dropped significantly (it's easier to cook at home than to pick something up) and we're eating healthier too, and having fun together!

The expensive bits of the pizza are the cheese and toppings, no?

OT but by "a single pizza order" do you mean 1 pizza or several in one order? Even good (i.e. not fast-food) pizzas cost maybe €10-12 around here, if it's for a single pizza $30 sounds like a lot of money to pay for it!

I’ve been going deep on sour dough, like so many others.
A key thing people don’t seem to mention is having an oven that can get up to a high temperature 260° C seems to be the goal.
180°C seems to be as high as the oven I inherited in my flat will go.

You may already do it, but you can help by putting the bread in a pre-heated iron pot. This seems to help stabilize the temperature (and it helps top the top burning too).

Our oven broke, unfortunately. So ours (and perhaps yours) next best bet is to order a bread-maker.

you got the yeast, eggs, sugar, cheese, toppings, milk etc all for free?

a good sourdough pizza made from scratch in your own oven from your own starter is divine. definitely worth the hassle of making a starter.

Unopened I agree with, but bad? The quality of most people's homemade baked goods is dependent on skill and equipment, not the age of their flour. There is a risk of weevils over time perhaps, but that can ruin fresh flour too.
I've baked cakes with two year old self raising flour (it's getting on for three now) and it's fine. On the foreseeable timescale of covid it's certainly not an issue. I used to buy 16kg bags from Shipton Mill which would last 3-4 months no problem.

> sit in people’s pantry and go bad
The stuff keeps for years if it doesn't get wet or bugs in it. Certainly my mums flour jar has some pretty old flour in.

different types of flours are less likely to have weevils. The more highly processed white flours are unlikely to have weevils. Less refined whole wheat flours can and do need different long-term storage. The usual recommendation is to freeze it in batches to kill the bugs, and then store in plastic or glass type containers (not paper).

Buy a mill folks! The one I bought for 10 years back cost me about $350. Steep, yes. Considering all that freshly ground flour in the proportions that I wanted, it was a no-brainer in hindsight. I cannot for the life of me find reasonably priced wheat kernels at this time. So paradoxically for the past 2 months it has been sitting idle!

When I first read this, I somehow thought you meant an actual building, and not the in-home type. Must be the whole Friday evening thing.

You are not alone

Ha ha ha! Sorry for the confusion. My mind kept saying "don't endorse a particular brand". So I was "carefully" optimizing my response for that!

Those talking about the economics appear to live in areas with abundant flour.
In many places in the US at least, it's very difficult to find any. It has been this way for weeks. Supermarkets get it and it flies off the shelves.

Where are you? At the big stores in Brooklyn for a while there was no flour. But now going to smaller stores I see it no problem. Seems like less of a shortage issue than just that most folks in my area are all inefficiently picking their grocery store.

In Columbus, Ohio here. Last week was the first time we have had flour back on the shelves and the types were limited. Still haven't seen any yeast available.

Newport Beach, CA here and it's been off the shelf for awhile but also recently popped back up, along with other essentials like the infamous toilet paper.

Maybe ask a local bakery or pizza shop.

I don't need any more so haven't made a real study but I'd note that both King Arthur and Bob's Red Mill are out of their main products online. (But they're somewhat artisan so they probably have more capacity constraints than the bigger players do.)

I wonder how much of that is because they are out vs it's just a lot more efficient to send it by the pallet to grocers instead of one bag at a time to end users.
I've seen this in other industries too - manufacturers will sell retail direct when times are "normal" because it's easy profit and they can fulfill out of "slack in the system". But when demand skyrockets they lack the slack energy to deal with retail-direct, so they just send everything through distribution.

Yea I live in NYC (fidi) and also been having problems finding flour. I can't necessarily travel long distances to different grocery stores because I don't want to ride the subway etc. The grocery stores around me don't have it and haven't had luck with delivery.
Last week finally got costco to deliver a 50lb bag which is apparently all they have at the moment...
But I think I agree with you, it's less of a true shortage and more of a supply chain to certain stores issue. Are we really consuming more flour at this point or are we just throwing all these established supply chains to completely restructure?

In Canada, there have been supply shortages but according to Robin Hood (major Canadian flour producer), the supply issues are both at the endpoint (grocery stores not stocking enough) as well as in secondary products, e.g. they cite that there's a lack of packaging, but that their flour supply is healthy.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/robin-hood-flour-baking-yel...
That said regions will obviously vary. Canada is a major wheat producer.

In other words, supply-chain problems just like we're seeing in many other segments: paper products, sanitizer, rice/beans, etc.

This is another example of our economy being so interconnected that it's really hard to tell what is and isn't essential. If you lack enough "non-essential" goods for your business, then your business doesn't work either. I just hope that the businesses relying on machines for their output aren't reliant on some obscure parts that will be impossible to source if they break.

This is an opportunity to reduce use of one-use packaging. Simply ship the flour in a gaylord to the point of distribution and have people bring their own canisters, tare them, and fill them.

This is almost certainly not the time for that. Stores have eliminated a lot of their self-serve stations and even deli counters and the like.

The bulk bins are still open in my neighborhood.

When the virus persists for days on most surfaces and everyone is required to wear disposable gloves, customers bringing their own reusable bags has never been less appealing than it is right now.
NYC (coincidentally) banned single-use plastic bags a week or so before the COVID-19 outbreak, and it was quickly reversed on sanitation grounds.

I don't know if it's statewide but all my local stores in Massachusetts have banned bringing in reusable bags.

“Eco-friendly” reusable bags are also made from non-woven polypropylene, which is now in short supply as it’s essential for producing N95 filters, surgical masks, and hospital-grade fabrics like gowns and pillow cases.

I live in NYC and they still do not give us plastic bags anymore. Was this ban really "reversed"? I've been using reusable bags for the whole pandemic, and a quick google tells me the enforcement has been postponed, not that the ban was reversed.

You’re right that it was only delayed, but it has so far been delayed three times. Retailers filed lawsuits against the ban that the courts have no capacity to deal with, so it’s unlikely to be enforced (or formally reversed) until the outbreak subsides.
I live in Brooklyn and still get plastic bags at three different grocery stores I can think of. (I reuse them as trash can liners, so the ban always seemed silly to me — I’d need to start buying my own plastic bags in addition to the paper ones I recycle.) There was a week or two that most stores switched to paper, so you may be seeing paper-only bags from stores that have unused stock to go through. Some grocers (Whole Foods) have always been paper-only.
New Hampshire, Illinois, and Massachusetts have specifically banned the use of reusable shopping bags in grocery stores state-wide on sanitation grounds. San Francisco has as well. I was confusing these with NYC when I commented above. NYC’s enforcement delays are unrelated to concerns over reusables.

> This is an opportunity to reduce use of one-use packaging. Simply ship the flour in a gaylord to the point of distribution and have people bring their own canisters, tare them, and fill them.
One of the first things to go at our local grocery stores were bulk-binned products that weren't fresh produce. They've also banned reusable shopping bags. I don't anyone is going to try an idea like yours soon.

I like this model, and this is how I normally buy my flour, but since this pandemic started, my bulk goods store no longer allows you to bring in containers or scoop your own goods - a staff member escorts you around the store and scoops what you want into plastic bags. Works alright, though it’s a bit less convenient to estimate the amount of their bags that I need to fit my containers.

> That said regions will obviously vary. Canada is a major wheat producer.
Mildly interesting number I worked out the other day: Canada produces about enough wheat for 2000 Calories/day for 80 million people. (With a population of ~38m.)

And what percentage of an average person's calorie intake would wheat normally be? 20%? 50% seems high? So you could multiply that 80 million figure by something like 5 to get a number of people that Canadian wheat farmers feed (400 million!).
Of course there's a lot of flaws with that type of math (I'm sure a significant percentage goes into animal feed, etc), but it's a fun way of thinking about the numbers. :) The vast size of the Canadian prairie wheat farms (and the relatively small number of people it takes to run them) are difficult to comprehend for a lot of people that don't live there.

It seems so bizarre that so much flour is being consumed now. Are people hoarding it, or would this demand otherwise have been met from restaurants?

I think it's more that people are going from purchasing fresh bread to purchasing the ingredients for fresh bread.

Yes, there doesn't seem to be a shortage of bread on the shelves although if you only shop once a week it might not last.

A spike in demand for ingredients used to make baked goods. People have the time now to experiment with things they previously had an interest in but not enough motivation to see it through.

More importantly, baking your own bread saves you a trip to grocery store. My household went from shopping 3-4 times a week to less than once a week. I.e. we no longer do the "fresh bread + some small items" morning runs, only the one bulk trip every ~10 days. That means reducing the number of opportunities to get infected or infect others by a factor of 5.

https://xkcd.com/2296/

Baking at home has skyrocketed. When you're bored it's an easy, family-friendly rewarding way to spend a couple hours.
Think about how often people bake normally. Not often. Now it's all the time.
Same reason why eggs and vanilla are also harder to find in some places.

Eggs seem to be pretty much back in stock where I live though they were scarce for a while. With eggs, it may not be baking so much (and you mostly don't even use them with yeast bread). But you've got whole families at home and I imagine there are a lot more hot breakfasts going on which can chew up egg stocks pretty quickly.

This was true for us. I live with my fiance and we started cooking an omlette to be split between us every morning since this started. At three eggs a morning we can go through a dozen every 4 days. At one point we were trying to skip a trip to the store so I made a batch of black beans that we were eating for breakfast with tortillas and fresh cilantro.
Store pickup also complicated things as you usually only get about 60 to 70 percent of the items you ask for, and usually it's the sundries that get knocked out. So you can ask for all the ingredients for a complete meal plan and wind up with all the vegetables and a little meat but nothing else. Or you get shorted on other aspects of the pickup(this is just a bare statement of fact). We gave up and just went into the store with homemade PPE.
I do think this situation is revealing just how fragile our system of just-in-time delivery and globalization is. For things like N95 masks national borders are very real, and being dependent on China for everything in the US is really really bad.
It's also highlighting for me how important it is to know how to cook and be fluent in different kinds of cooking besides the standard American diet. When this first started the store shelves were picked clean of anything that most people recognize as nonperishable food. So I grabbed things like textured vegetable protein and millet. The shortages are really only a problem if you don't cook from first principles or don't have much experience with spices or other sources of flavor.

>Store pickup also complicated things as you usually only get about 60 to 70 percent of the items you ask for, and usually it's the sundries that get knocked out.
Making a grocery store run about once a week (earlyish AM on a weekday) is one of the few compromises I've been making to just staying on my own property or adjacent basically unused forest trails. And the reason is as you say. I find a lot of real-time adjustments are still needed depending upon what's in stock.

GP was asking if the assertion is being made that overall aggregate demand has increased, and if so why.
ie. if people are baking more and buying bread less.

Homemade vanilla takes a few months but it's easy and tastes fantastic. Some vanilla beans with some vodka or rum.

I doubt that much more flour is being consumed.
It's probably all logistics and supply chain issues because everything was geared towards delivering 1000lb loads of flour to a bakery instead of 100 x 10 lbs bags of flour to the grocery store.

People used to buy bread every few days, or go out to eat sandwiches, pizza, etc.
Now, my bread purchases have gone to zero (Since we go shopping every few weeks, and have no room, or interest in freezing bread.) I'm not eating out.
My net consumption of flour probably hasn't changed much, but my purchases of flour have gone up, dramatically.

In the UK, according to various sources including the BBC[0], there is plenty of flour, but one of the main problems is that most of the production lines are geared up to producing large e.g. 25kg sacks, given 96% of sales are to bulk buyers for trades like bakeries, with only 4% of flour sold direct to consumers in retail outlets in small 1kg or 1.5kg bags. I'd imagine it might not be dissimilar in many other countries too. So in the UK you should no problem buying a 25kg sack of flour from a wholesaler. There are actually lots of companies who specialise in providing food in wholesale quantities to places like schools and restaurants, most of whoch are in difficulty given their market has disappeared, although some are now temporarily selling to the general public to try to stay afloat[1]. I feel like I've learned an unexpectedly large amount about supply chains in recent weeks.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52212760
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52066764

>... one of the main problems is that most of the production lines are geared up to producing large e.g. 25kg sacks, given 96% of sales are to bulk buyers for trades like bakeries, with only 4% of flour sold direct to consumers in retail outlets in small 1kg or 1.5kg bags.
For anyone who's interested, The Indicator podcast by Planet Money briefly touches on this point in their most recent episode on potatoes in the US.
https://www.npr.org/2020/04/23/843437140/the-great-potato-gi...

I live in London, it's been four weeks since I last saw a pack of flour on the store shelf. The demand is that high.

-Do you have yeast? Over on the other side of the North Sea, we've got more flour than we know what to do with on the shelves, as there is no yeast to be had - haven't seen a yeast cube in a month! (good thing sourdough is a thing!)

Yes! I managed to find a block of yeast last week. But, I can't use it as I got no flour :(

We need to talk, then. :)

Get flour from Centralmilling company: https://centralmilling.com/store/
Order a 50 lb sack and you're good to go. They still have it in stock.

In Germany, I have flour, but no yeast
I made a sourdough starter. It is kind of working, but some parts are tasting odd. There was also mold buildup at the margin

> There was also mold buildup at the margin
Throw that bit away and give it more flour and water (I use a 70g flour/100g water ratio). It'll be fine.

You need to make sure that the culture is stable before you use it -- it should smell sour, but with no other foul smells. In the first week of a new starter, you shouldn't use it because the bacterial cultures are still fighting for dominance.
As for mould build-up, that isn't a good sign. It does happen and I know people who just scrape off the mould and move on with their lives but I'd personally start again from scratch.

It got better
The real problem is that I keep it in the fridge too long, when I do not need it

Send me an email message, I can ship you some. I've got a kilo of SAF red and gold yeast, I can ship you 50g (or anyone on HN, feel free).
Btw, you don't need much yeast - just use less than 0.5 grams, let the dough rise for 8 hours at room temp. You can save that dough and continue making more bread from the culture.

-That's most kind of you, I really appreciate it - however, I do have a sourdough starter available and can (and do!) make all the bread we need - I was just amused at /our/ supply chain having a flour surplus and no yeast, whereas in the UK it appeared to be the other way around...

For most of the past month there's been neither in the UK. No flour, no yeast. In the past week flour has been on the shelves and not disappearing immediately, so I think demand has more or less been satiated, but no sign of yeast anywhere.

Of course if you have baking soda and/or baking powder (depending on what you're making), there are a lot of quick breads, scones, biscuits, etc. that you can make without yeast. I'm doing both yeast and non-yeast baking. I do have a sourdough starter although I also have yeast which can make things a bit easier.

If your flour is unbleached it'll already have yeast in it. You can turn it into a starter with a bit of easy regular work: https://www.alieward.com/ologies/gastroegyptology

If you need it, mills are selling it directly. I bought a 16kg bag of strong white and another of strong wholemeal for delivery from Marriages (flour.co.uk) this morning — after a few hours of running a simple Bash script to poll occasionally and make a noise when the website no longer said ‘out of stock’. Shipton Mill are also delivering if you can get a slot.

For anyone looking for flour, here's a nice resource I found that lists local grains & flours. (It looks like they list a couple options in England. Truthfully though, I'm not sure how close they are to you).
https://challengerbreadware.com/where-to-buy-grains-flours/

We've moved into a real-world board game. This tile over here has wheat, if you go get it and then move to this tile, you can process it and gain bread - but your bread resource declines by 1 loaf per day.

Anecdotal: In the city where I live, my family hasn't been able to buy flour for the past 4 weeks. It's always out of stock. I hear from clerks that they get it occasionally but it sells out in under an hour. My closest grocery store also allots the first hour after they open to seniors and others who are vulnerable and most of the time, the flour is gone during this hour.
Since we export so much grain every year, I'm amazed that there's such a massive shortage of flour. I don't know if it's the shortage of grains or mills.

Flour have been in short supply at the nearby grocery store. First it was pasta and toilet paper, then flour and eggs, now it is mostly back to normal. My guess is that many people cook more than usual during the lockdown.
I don't think there is a significant shortage of the raw material, but maybe there is not enough of it packaged for grocery stores.

Where I am (New Zealand) there is no shortage of flour, but a shortage of packaging. The vast bulk of flour was previously sold to bakers and other buyers in bulk - 25kg sacks. Now demand is for 1-5kg bags. The flour is here, but it's in the wrong bags and the suppliers have no staff or materials. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...

In a lot of countries villagers plant their own wheat, mill it and bake bread for the entire year. Others buy 50-80lbs bags of wheat. Wheat is great for hard times, it fills your stomach and relatively cheap. It's a peace of mind as well, no matter what happens we have something

Opening this page pegged one processor in firefox :/

Something very daft going on inside a requestAnimationFrame loop causing lots of css style re-computation with no discernible affect, pretty sad.

I can't really understand how this is economical. After 10 days, they produced 200 3-lbs bags of flour. I don't know what they sell for but I can get flour in a supermarket for 30c/lbs so maybe 60c/lbs since its artisanal? So that's $360 out the door, but how much did you pay for the wheat itself, to the grocer(if not direct to consumer), and for operating the mill?

From what I understand, in at least some areas of the world the mill was a service model, not a manufacturing model.
You'd bring your grain in, they would mill it, and keep a fraction of the product as a fee. Sure, they're still selling flour for goods and services, but it's a fraction of the volume versus buying grain and selling flour.
The overhead is tiny, but the distribution area is, too.

What I understand is that's how it worked everywhere. Lots of small mills that took a cut as payment.
Friend of mine mentioned a while back one of his 12 year old nieces in India getting bread. Started with measuring out a wheat into a bucket. Then going down the street to a place that ground it into flour. Then to a place that turned that into dough. A place next door that beat it into shape. Finally to the baker. Each place took a bit as payment.
This isn't like way back when, it was a couple of years ago.
BTW: There is a working gristmill in St Helena, closed till further notice of course. I think they run it a couple of times a year.
https://napaoutdoors.org/parks/bale-grist-mill-state-histori...

That's how things still work in Pakistan to some extent. Especially if you want maize/barley/etc flour, you bring the seed, they will mill it for you.

> I can get flour in a supermarket for 30c/lbs
Per the rest of the thread: you can't get it at that price in the supermarket in a lot of places. There's an empty shelf with that price tag on.

people who are used to eating out have now bought a lot of grains and flour.

Funny, as there is no shortage of bread on the supermarket shelves.

I think I read that only 4% of flour ends up in the shelves in normal times. Most of it goes direct to bakeries.

In 10 days of operation, they have 200 3lb bags of flour.
Each would be worth $1.50 in walmart, and due to anti price-gouging laws, it would be illegal to charge more than that.
So after 10 days operating, with presumably at least a few people on-site, they have produced goods which can sell for $300, or a revenue of $30 per day.
I think this is more a publicity excercise than a commercial operation...

Yes. This is a charming story of kindness, community, and cultural heritage. It is not a business story.

Not that there aren't serious questions, but it's common for prototypes and early production runs to easily cost 100x vs optimized production runs.
And if it's meeting a need, I would suggest that the immediate cost isn't the primary concern or benefit here.

I suspect they were selling it for a higher price before the emergency as a souveneir.

Thankfully this is in a tiny village in beautiful Dorset, England with a modest local population, and no there is no Walmart... so none of that applies.

Technically there is Walmart in Dorset. Walmart owns the Asda supermarket chain and there are branches in the larger towns in Dorset.

There is no asda in Sturminster Newton... even if there were US consumer law does not apply.

At the moment, they have been trying to offload it for some time.

Nor do we have price gouging laws.

No, in 10 days they have sold 200 bags of flour.
> In its first fully functional 10-day period, they milled a ton of wheat; under normal circumstances, that would've been a year's worth. As a result, it has already been able to deliver 200 three-pound bags of flour to local stores and bakeries.
Assume that the ramp up was bumpy. Maybe they can do half a ton a day (5x), and they have >3x as much product as they've sold... they might be able to do $500 a day until the equipment breaks down. For a tourist trap that could be pretty respectable.

I think it's more a public service that happens to provide some publicity rather than the other way around. People want/need flour right now with various supply chain issues, and this mill can help produce some locally. Of course it makes no business sense (which is probably why the mill shut down 50 years ago)... that's not the immediate issue.

Anti price gouging likely won't come into play here.

Price gouging laws won't generally prevent them from continuing to sell at the price they've been selling at. It's fancy artisanal flour with a story, so they charge twice that for a bag. [1]
[1]: https://sturminsternewton-museum.co.uk/theme-content/uploads...

$1/pound or so is pretty typical for even relatively mass-market "artisanal" flours in the US. That's about what Bob's Red Mill and King Arthur go for. (For their regular white flour. More specialty items are more.)

Holy crap - what information do you have about these people that makes you think they are engaging in a publicity exercise, rather than simply trying to help?

The information we have is the scale of their operation.
If they were trying to get flour to people in the most efficient way possible they'd be using that manpower to repackage from wholesale distributors. There's no shortage of flour milling capacity -- the shortages are distribution related.
This is touched on in the article.
As it stands, they're really producing a negligible amount of flour. A nice gesture, but not the kind of thing you'd do if you're earnestly trying to address a problem. It's very clearly a stunt -- not that there's anything wrong with that.

> millers Pete Loosmore and Imogen Bittner decided that, due to the current demand for flour and the loss of income from visitors, this would be a good time to re-embrace the mill's commercial production capabilities.
I mean, I wouldn't call it a publicity exercise, but they quite explicitly say they need to make up for lost tourism income. Call it an operational pivot.
The lesson here is it's good to have a diversity of offerings. Some of their budget probably comes from historic site funds and maybe they also offer weddings or events, but the point is there certainly is a commercial interest in this.

The useful content of his(her?) reply is that the so called "price gouging laws" can not only have good effects, but also bad ones.
This flour could be selling higher, and creating more incentive to produce.
But I agree, that publicity stunt bit is needlessly agressive

This is a heritage charity and most certainly not a commercial operation. There are many old mills around the UK, many still in working order, of multiple types.
Most are registered with the SPAB: https://www.spab.org.uk/mills

"Each would be worth $1.50 in walmart"
This is stoneground flour produced in small batches which will almost certainly be sold at a premium price. Flour in the UK is commonly sold in 1 or 1.5kg packets in supermarkets and this would be priced anything from £2.00 to £4.00 ($2.5 to $5 / €2.3 to 4.6)

Is it really legal to sell stoneground flour in Britain or on the continent in this day and age? It is known from both archaeological excavations and studies of Third World populations that tiny little bits of the millstone flake off into ground flour, and gradually, over time, these stone fragments cause severe damage to people’s teeth. I would have imagined that there would already be legislation to require the use of metal milling.

Yes, it's legal. After all, sweets haven't been banned and they cause lots of tooth decay.

Don't modern flours have little bits of granite sand in to make an "authentic" texture?

Fascinating. Another example of the HN community's "Assume Bad Faith" in action. If I had to come up with a list of values for this community based on popular comments, I think it's a photo finish for the top between:
* Assume Bad Faith
* Be Pessimistic

I know what you're saying but it's not HN, just a sizeable minority of misery-guts who can't tolerate success or decency in others.
And if I may add another bullet point to yours
+ It's all hopeless so why bother trying to change it.

Out of curiosity, how is gouging calculated relative to profit? At one point does profit become gouging?

Walmart sells premium flour (which this limited production product would count as) for much more than $1.50.
And it’s something for the limited staff to do while otherwise unemployed.

Suggested title:
Thousand-Year-Old Mill Producing Flour for First Time in 50 Years Due to Demand

How about:
Thousand-Year-Old Mill Producing Flour for First Time in 50 Years Due to Inability for Supply Chains to Divert Product from Shut-Down Commercial Buyers to Personal Customers

Does anyone know why it is such a problem for our supply chain to shift from commercial buyers to consumers?
I imagine there are people out there willing to buy in commercial sizes, if packaging is the problem...

Supposedly a problem in Canada was bags.
Dunno why it took them so long to start shipping them in plainer bags though.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/robin-hood-flour-baking-yel...
Would prefer to pay a few cents less for all my goods instead of advertising for the product I just bought in my own home.

The short answer is "because logistics".

This is the best response. I like highlighting that this is a logistics problem, because humanity has become more adept at solving logistics issues since the start of the 21st century.
I feel like people are becoming increasingly fatalistic about challenges like overpopulation while we have tools to help fix these problems that didn't exist 20 years ago. Yes, the world is changing at a speed that makes people uneasy, but the world that emerges out of this could be more resilient, better fed, and more environmentally sound as long as we continue to solve problems.

Can you share some of the advances in logistics since 2000?
We've had shipping containers for a few decades before that, trucks and pipelines and so on.
What's new?

Basically, digital technology. We now have access to so much raw data, with such immediacy, and the capability to process it, that we can identify and work around problems and find more efficient solutions faster and better than ever. The main way this shows up in society is probably the maximization of profits that leads to increased wealth/prosperity. That doesn't describe who is getting that wealth of course :), but it's there. So we have a better opportunity and capability to solve problems than ever before. The trick is getting society to adopt it properly.
WRT the logistics of scaling a supply chain, we have the capability to identify supply chain inefficiencies and provide fixes. As a store sells out of toilet paper, it's possible for the store's database to be linked up to the toiler paper distribution company, so they know when a shortage is happening in real time. But how long does it take the manufacturer they buy from to spin up more TP? Too long. To fill the gap immediately, the store would need to detect that the original distributor won't be able to fulfill the projected increased capacity, and start filling orders with some other distributor somewhere else in the world to get more TP. But we also may be assuming that the whole world isn't having a shortage... if it is, is there enough cargo plane capacity to ship from these remote places? If not, more logistics is needed.
The capability to automatically perform that logistical ninjutsu at each stage of the supply chain is now easier than ever. But nobody ever programmed their systems (much less signed the right business agreements) to actually do it, because nobody really needed TP to "scale". And this is the actually hard logistics problem: it's not enough to have the capability to do something, you have to actually implement it in your system. They haven't done that, so the supply chain doesn't automatically scale.
But all of that ignores the impact of a global trade network on logistics. Assume you did this for coffee, and a shortage of beans (or price increase) from one country led you to automatically buy from another country with cheaper/more plentiful beans. The impact would be to automatically penalize one country's farmers for trade embargoes, drought, war, or some other issue. So while logistics are a very useful tool, they should be balanced against their potential side-effects if we really want to maximize their benefit on a global scale.

Right, but I’m very interested to learn the details of what specifically was the logistics problem. Do you have some insight you can share?

I have factory that turns big bags of flour to small bags of flour.
Demand increases overnight.
I attempt to keep up. I order more bags which takes non-0 time to be fulfilled. My machines physically cannot bag much faster.
Boom, shortage

I'm from Estonia, the usual problem when it came to industrial goods was that consumers don't have a VAT ID and are protected by Consumer Protection and Technical Regulatory Authority. In B2B, companies need to handle problems between themselves, so that means the need to offer 2 years of warranty per EU laws to consumers, labeling and instruction manual in Estonian and probably much more that I can't remember.
But given these times, it's not a problem: I already know of at least 2 wholesale food suppliers who opened up their ordering systems to be used for B2C.

But it's not producing for the first time in 50 years - it's just producing full time, whereas previously it was milling on a demonstration basis.

Ah - unfortunately I can't think of a more concise way to put it than the article does: "Back In The Flour Business".

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