Thousand-Year-Old Mill Producing Flour for First Time in 50 Years Due to Demand
Thousand-Year-Old Mill Producing Flour for First Time in 50 Years Due to Demand
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
I imagine there are people out there willing to buy in commercial sizes, if packaging is the problem...
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.
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.
We've had shipping containers for a few decades before that, trucks and pipelines and so on.
What's new?
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.
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
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.