"Phase Five Supply Chain – With a Message From A Dairy Farmer…." and more.
A brief glimpse into the supply chain and limited ability to re-engineer to the "home-bound"consumer.
Understanding your domestic food supply and the difficulties in supply chain adjustment
"..the overall U.S. food delivery system; however, this network [to supply commercial and restaurant ] was approximately 60 percent of all food consumption on a daily basis.
The ‘food away from home‘ sector has its own supply chain.
Very few restaurants and venues (cited above) purchase food products from retail grocery outlets.
As a result of the coronavirus mitigation effort the ‘food away from home’ sector has been reduced by 75% of daily food delivery operations.
However, people still need to eat. That means retail food outlets, grocers, are seeing sales increases of 25 to 50 percent, depending on the area.
The retail consumer supply chain for manufactured and processed food products includes bulk storage to compensate for seasonality.
As Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue recently noted “there are over 800 commercial and public warehouses in the continental 48 states that store frozen products.”
As a nation we essentially stay one harvest ahead of demand by storing it and smoothing out any peak/valley shortfalls.
There are a total of 175,642 commercial facilities involved in this supply-chain across the country "
" One dairy farmer helps explain:
Are we dumping milk because of greed or low demand, no. It’s the supply chain, there are only so many jug fillers, all were running 24/7 before this cluster you-know-what."
Now demand for jug milk has almost doubled. However, restaurant demand is almost gone; NO ONE is eating out.
Restaurant milk is distributed in 2.5 gal bags or pint chugs; further, almost 75 percent of milk is processed into hard products in this country, cheese and butter.
Mozzarella is almost a third of total cheese production; how’s pizza sales going right now?? "
Eggs? Same problem. Bakeries and restaurants of any size use Pullman egg cases, 30 dozen at a pop, 30 eggs to a flat, 12 flats to a case.
There are only so many 1 dozen egg cartons available and only so many packing machines.
Industrial bakeries and processors of packaged food buy bulk liquid eggs, no carton at all.
H/T to Duncan Waring !
Duncan Waring :" ... For almost 8 weeks the retail supply chain has been operating beyond capacity and the burn rate of raw food products is up a stunning 40 percent."
THanks for the ping :-)
Realize too that besides diary dumping milk, there have been vegetable farmers plowing under crops,
meat processing plants are closing due to coronovavirus infection among workers, etc., etc.
The entire food supply chain is there and remains intact;
there should not be food shortages according to the media.
The main issue is getting the crop transported to the consumer in convenient packaging .
According to the pizza shop next door to my place, really well. They had to hire more pizza makers. Of course the only other place to eat in town is the diner which does not deliver.