We can't possibly have enough overhead in our system to accommodate this, right? Eventually this is going to lead to shortages in grocery stores, right? This has to be our number one priority.
From my understanding, the bottlenecks are in the processing plants due to massive shift in demand preferences. Restuarants take their orders differently than consumers, often buying whole sections of an animal or at different style cuts, or in the case of flour buying it in 25-50 lbs bags. Consumers widely prefer more processing of their meats (meaning boneless skinlesss chicken breast rather than a whole chicken) or smaller purchases sizes.
Honestly, I don't think this will get worse in the US in the short of mid term. The biggest issue is that the food prices being offered farmers/ranchers right now are terrible, so if we see a demand spike post recovery (due to restaurants reopening) we may not have the supply.
The experience for consumer-packaged flour differs a lot by region, but it seems it was mostly about the capacity of consumer flour packaging facilities than the capacity of flour mills or wheat farmers. Similar thing with toilet paper: people were pooping at home more, so they needed consumer-packaged toilet paper, thus there was a temporary shortage of consumer-packaged toilet paper while facilities adapted to demand.
RE flour: here in Hamilton, Ontario, flour in consumer packaging was a rare find for about a week, until retail prices rose slightly (10%?) and now things are basically back to normal in terms of availability.
There was a real demand issue on TP as well- lots of people who used to only buy 1-6 roles at a time started panic buying 4x the amount.
It is not simple to retool a commercial bulk TP supplier into a consumer TP supplier, they at least need some different inputs.
IME it has also varied greatly by location. I couldn't get any for months at my store, but I later found out a different location of the same chain had it in stock routinely. Also, restaurants near me are selling flour now. Presumably they had large quantities that they just need to repackage.
To support the local economy, I started buying from a farm that used to supply restaurants and chefs. That has resulted in its own kind of headache. I can put together a decent meal, but I have few ideas how to go forward with nasturtium petals, begonia leaves, edible succulents. Micro-greens are very pretty scattered over a Michelin-star plate, but looks awfully stupid on a spatchcock roast chicken.
The shortages are here. So far they're not so bad that people will starve, they will just have to transition to alternative food choices. How far it will go is anyone's guess.
Here's another interesting example with flour.
King Arthur flour sales increased by 2,000% in March. > https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/king-arthur-flour-sal... leading to problems like retail flour manufacturers running out of packaging to put flour in. https://www.businessinsider.com/flour-shortage-baking-quaran...
Keep in mind that in this situation, the goal is to ensure that already-grown food isn’t wasted and is able to be processed, not necessarily meeting the perfect market demand that you’d see in normal economic conditions.
"What I cook for myself at home" and "what I order in restaurants" are two pretty disjoint sets.
I'm not even sure the total number of calories will come out 1:1; are people eating less because they're not commuting or working? Eating better because they are cooking? Eating worse because they are depressed? I can't even guess.
Think fancy cheeses. Some dairy cows make excellent milk for cheese. The input into this market is raw milk. When that market disappears due to restaurants closing, it's a serious problem.
Say you've got a bottling plant that sells exclusively to commercial suppliers. The cost to retool to produce consumer packaged products is non-zero. Your shipping is all geared to commercial suppliers as well.
If you decide to reorient to produce consumer packaged goods this takes some amount of time. The farmers that supply you have a batch of milk right now they're storing and a batch coming up next week. If you can't take delivery, you don't have infinite cold storage for milk after all, they need to dump their milk because they've for another batch on the way they'll need to store. You may also have milk stored in your refrigerated tanks waiting for you to be able to reorient for consumer packaging. If your tanks are full you're not going to get new supplies.
There's a lot of supply chains that have a lot of momentum and they've been optimized for throughput because that's what gives everyone involved the best margins. When demand drops it takes time and money to slow down or adjust the supply chain because of the momentum. Things like milk can be more difficult because they need not just storage but refrigerated storage and shipping.
You might have milk and I might want milk but we're far apart and if you can't get it to me (safely) I'm not going to buy it. That's not to say it's good farmers are dumping otherwise good food. Dealing with perishable things is not the same as dry goods. You can't just add more trucks or warehouses and problem solved.
Presumably, if you have X food being produced by farms across the country, and people eating it, but split between restaurants (Y) and home (Z)... I would expect X to roughly equal Y + Z.
I would also expect Y + Z = total food eaten and not see any change in the value of Y + Z regardless of how food shifts between the two.
So how can you take away Y, but not increase Z at the same proportion?
Guesses: 1) Restaurants use a lot more ingredients? Seems unlikely since margins are so low.
2) Consumers reduce waste because they are not balancing getting food from two sources and are more likely to eat everything in their fridge? (My wife, son and I experienced this after we found out our son has food allergies to more than nuts and we basically only eat home cooked food), but I don't know if that is big enough.
3) Something else?
My gut tells me we are seeing a reduction in food waste which is due to less supplies, people being more careful. IDK.
If you're calculating demand based on ability to pay (which is how markets work), it might be helpful to take a look at the pictures of food bank lines across America[0]. Tens of millions of people have filed for unemployment in the last several weeks, and demand at the food banks have skyrocketed. But since food banks don't operate as typical market, we don't pay attention to them. With so many millions at risk of starvation, we need to rethink how we understand demand in the context of food consumption, because millions of people waiting for several hours in order to get a bag of food tells me that the demand is there.
0: https://www.motherjones.com/food/2020/04/these-photos-show-t...
Based on the emptyness of my local store shelves over the past couple months, demand isn't the problem. Supply chain capacity is.
Millions upon millions of Americans are at risk of starvation, and a central goal of an initiative like this is to make food as available as possible so that people don’t starve.
0: https://www.npr.org/2020/04/17/837141457/thousands-of-cars-l...
I.e. the question isn't "do people still need to eat" it's "will the shift in food demand type from commercial to consumer good create shortages".
These disturbing images have stirred outrage around the world. But here’s the surprising part: the world may not actually be wasting more than normal, when a third of global food production ends up in landfills.
producers > stores > consumers.
The same waste would happen in the system. but now it moved all to the first step.
This is not saying that this is OK. This is just highlighting a problem that was always there and nobody cared/cares :(