How worried about bare spots on grocery store shelves should you be? The answer, food supply chain experts say, is … complicated. Food isn’t about to be scarce in the U.S. anytime soon—but you may not be able to get all the variety you usually take for granted if you typically have the money to shop at will.
There have been some high-profile closures of major meat processing plants, due to COVID-19 infections among workers, that could make some meats difficult to come by. But a significant part of the reason for bare shelves is the rapid move from restaurant meals to home cooking. Food that usually goes to restaurants isn’t packaged or labeled for consumer sale, so that food can’t just be shipped to grocery stores as-is.
“At the flip of a switch, the food-service sector slowed down and people wiped the grocery stores clean,” the CEO of a cold-food distributor told The Washington Post. “It’s sitting in everyone’s home fridges and freezers, and we have to backfill the grocery stores.”
Moreover, people have stocked up on shelf-stable foods like rice and beans, pasta, and canned tuna, leading to shortages of those foods while other things are in much lower demand.
Restaurant suppliers are trying to shift food into grocery stores, but it can be complicated, because the average consumer is not looking for restaurant-sized tubs of food. Similarly, parts of the supply chain facing potential labor shortages are looking at ways to keep getting food to stores. One chicken processing company executive told The New York Times that the company might just start packaging chickens without breaking them down into breasts and thighs and wings. It would be “a less consumer-friendly product,” he said, but “not a disaster” for people to have the option of buying a whole chicken vs. no chicken at all.
Of course, these are problems for people privileged enough to have ample food budgets, which is a number that’s gone down with the skyrocketing unemployment due to coronavirus. Food banks face a whole other set of problems, and show how many people are less worried about the grocery store having every single thing they could want than about being able to afford food at all.
