From my understanding, the shortages have already happened or are already happening. I was able to buy flour at my grocery store for first time in 2 months yesterady, I haven't seen a sale on meat since March, up till May we still had buying limits on milk and eggs.

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.

> I was able to buy flour at my grocery store for first time in 2 months

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.

My experience is similar: the ready-to-cook stuff like boneless skinless chicken breasts have been near impossible to find. The last time I went to the grocery there were huge bags full of unprocessed parts like leg quarters and half-split breasts. Whole chickens are plentiful. I'm very thankful for my good set of knives and my knife skills. I recently split a 25-lbs bag of King Arthur flour with another person because that's all that was available, the 10-lbs bags were sighted recently and even that was gone.

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.

> I was able to buy flour at my grocery store for first time in 2 months yesterady

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.

It is still tough to find toilet paper at retail here (Reno, Nevada), but manageable. The lack of commercially packaged TP being sold at retail or alternative market mechanisms remains one of the greate mysteries of the crisis for me. I know plenty of people who would have bought the big rolls just have something.

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.

Part of problem with retooling for consumer TP is that a lot of commercial TP is lower grade than consumers are used to at home; often barely meeting the definition of “two ply”, not soft or doped with humectants.

It is not simple to retool a commercial bulk TP supplier into a consumer TP supplier, they at least need some different inputs.

All true, but I was surprised I never saw a guy selling bulk rolls of TP in the parking lot (or I guess never heard how to buy it on the internet via eBay). I'm sure it existed somewhere, but it wasn't prominent enough to supply my brother and his roommates when they ran out.

It has more to do with the supply chain. Farmers sell to organizations who target certain areas. they sell to grocers who sell in stores. They also sell to restaurants, schools, etc. The restaurants and schools closed, so did those supply chains. Those who normally ate at school and restaurants now wanted to eat at home. Grocers had to pick up the supply chain. They didn't want to invest because this uptick was only temporary. So we had demand shock. If they raised prices, they'd be harassed for price gouging. So, then people started hording because there was no incentive to not horde, so the supply chain got more stressed.

Wendy's is out of beef in some locations. Of the big chains they will be hit first because of their "fresh, never frozen" policy on beef. The others have some cushion in the form of warehouses of frozen product. Domino's is out of ham. Grocery stores everywhere are limiting purchases of meat, milk, and eggs. My favorite grocer's butcher counter is frequently 1/3 empty. I have a good relationship with the butcher and he told me when deliveries come and to show up early on those days because there is a rush to get product.

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.

I'd guess that meat shortages are caused more by recent covid outbreaks at processing plants and less by waste.

The article is about broken supply chains as the cause of waste, and covid outbreaks at processing plants is one example of problems in the supply chain. Pigs, for example, have a fairly short window during which they can be slaughtered for food sale. If there's a glitch in the supply chain, those pigs have to be killed as waste because the next batch is already coming into that window and it's too expensive to keep feeding the last batch for an unknown period into the future.

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...

Not necessarily, since there’s not much overlap between processors for commercial clients like restaurants and consumer clients like grocery stores. The market for commercial food products has apparently cratered while demand for consumer food products remains high.

But if commercial (eg. restaurants) food consumption is down, shouldn't it be replaced 1:1 by consumer food consumption?

Consumers eat differently at home.

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.

While overall consumption remains the same (or similar, people need to eat) there's different supply chains involved in commercial and consumer consumption.

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.

Restaurants can't put leftovers in the fridge, so there's a huge amount of waste in the restaurant system.

Where did you get this idea? It depends on the item, but most things do get rolled over from one day to the next.

Not necessarily for the same products - people cooking at home aren't deep-frying everything.

"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.

Not necessarily, people don't cook the same things they purchase at restaurants. Additionally, a fair number of people don't seem to be competent at cooking much past a scrambled egg, so a lot of people choose packaged/prepared foods versus raw ingredients.

According to the article about 1/3 of food is thrown away. I would guess that consumers are throwing away less food and producers who typically sell to restaurants are throwing away more.

Sure, but the type of food people consume at home typically differs greatly from the food they eat out.

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.

Packaging and labeling are different for bulk commercial and small-package grocery-store logistics.

Anyone have any insight in to why people shifting to eat at home would lead to less overall food demand though?

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.

> Anyone have any insight in to why people shifting to eat at home would lead to less overall food demand though?

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...

I'd say there's some slack in the system due to how incredibly wasteful the HoReCa sector is, in particular hotels and event catering. But to the extent people shifted from eating out to eating in, that amount of extra demand isn't met by the consumer-oriented sector, and must be eventually reflected somewhere. I'm honestly surprised the food prices haven't gone up just yet, given the stories I hear saying that processing plants supplying HoReCa have a problem adjusting to providing to grocery stores.

Stores are locked in on pricing due to emergency order. I expect new stores to pop up with the ability to set new prices and pay more from suppliers.

> Anyone have any insight in to why people shifting to eat at home would lead to less overall food demand though?

Based on the emptyness of my local store shelves over the past couple months, demand isn't the problem. Supply chain capacity is.

Something has to fill the increased consumer food demand though which is what I think the parent comment was getting at originally - what will do that? One could argue reduction in waste but I'm not sure that'd be enough.

Have you seen the images of food bank lines in the last two months[0]? The problem with quantifying demand is that’s typically based on ability to pay, and we’re currently looking at what, 20% unemployment?

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...

Sure but that only goes to say demand is even higher not answer the question about how we're supposed to be able to source food for that demand if commercial food production isn't efficiently convertible to consumer food production.

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".

From the first paragraph of the article:

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.

Also why are people who don’t understand the dynamics at play outraged at the people whose work keeps them fed?

They're outraged _because_ they don't understand.

That may well be true. Perhaps those covering these kinds of phenomena aren’t explaining and giving this phenomenon enough context and would rather leave their audience in shock to ponder what.

"Eventually?" Where were you? There already were and are shortages. Costco at the beginning of March and seeing 10 gallons of only whole milk and no eggs, when they usually had 4-500 gallons of milk and thousands of eggs out for sale. The place was empty and there was little stock for months.

This is the kind of problem that markets should be able to solve well, given a bit of time. We'll see what happens.

Technically in a free market there wouldn't be any shortages because the prices will go through the roof. Food's still available, it's just that it costs a fortune. This is not what's happening right now because we don't have a free market, due to anti-price gouging laws.

Any price is illegal - Too low - product dumping Too high - price gouging same as everyone else - price fixing

I don't know why you're being down voted, especially since you're right.

The best part is when prices sky-rocket, people don't horde, and others see a chance to make some good money, so they switch to the new market. Its simple market signals.

This have only moved the waste from one place to another.

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 :(