FOOD PIPELINE CONFIGURATION

            Empty grocery store shelves have sent shock waves through the buying public.  For folks who thought America could never run out of food, it's quite jarring.  Our own multi-client food business helps explain the problem.

             Yes, there is plenty of food.  It's just not configured correctly.

             At Polyface, we serve some 50 restaurants, most of whom are all but closed and some of whom will never reopen.  Our hearts break for these big-hearted hospitality chefs.  For a few days last week, we ran out of 1 lb. packages of ground beef, the most common configuration for the home consumer.

             But we had 5,000 pounds of 5 lb. packages in the freezer, which is the most common configuration for our restaurant accounts.  This happened all through the food chain.  Plenty of food existed, but it was not configured for the sudden shift of market, from restaurant to home kitchen.  You can't just pull 5 lb. bags out of the freezer, thaw them, and repack them as 1 pounders.

             I can't imagine how much food got thrown away in the restaurant industry that was in the inventory pipeline and couldn't be re-purposed quickly enough for retail sale.  The more perishable the item, the harder the reconfiguration.  So while our hold time is fairly long on frozen product, for a produce or veggie operation, it's often just a couple of days.  If it starts down the wrong channel, it can't be switched in time to another.

             Furthermore, the supermarket system is an extremely closed system.  Back when we were concerned we would have an egg problem (because half our eggs go to restaurants), the local grocery stores were out of eggs.  Some of my blog readers wondered why we couldn't let Kroger have our eggs.  They had a shortage.  They don't want our eggs, at least on short notice.  They need insurance and agreements that take a long time to work through the bureaucracy. 

             Industrial egg producers were in the same jam we were in.  When one patron base suddenly stops, you can't just shift everything over to a different one.  When Franklin Covey wrote the wonderful book The Speed of Trust he pointed out the delay that necessarily occurs in all transactions when neither party trusts each other.  That's when you need attorneys, insurance companies, indemnification, hold harmless agreements and other requirements.  Unfortunately, America's orthodox conventional food system is immersed in the no-trust paradigm, in direct distinction to farmers' markets and farm direct marketers (like Polyface).

             With more than 50 percent of meals being prepared outside the home, a sudden shift to home kitchens is a major convulsion in an otherwise smooth-running food chain.  It has nothing to do with production or farmers; it has everything to do with contracts, liability insurance, litigation attorneys and packaging configuration.  A restaurant or convention center has completely different desires in all these areas than a family preparing meals at home.

             This is one of those unreported tragedies from broad cultural disruption.  Unfortunately, a plethora of local health department regulations often stymies food salvage and re-purposing.  So we lose millions of pounds of perfectly edible food.  It's a shame but that's the way it is.

             Did you see any food thrown away during this pandemic?