Longtime grocer Steve Antaya isn’t prone to worry.
The family’s grocery business, Tom’s Food Center, with stores in central lower Michigan, has weathered countless snowstorms that have ground store traffic to a halt for days, as well as national crises like 9/11 and the H1N1 influenza outbreak in 2009.
Still this week, Antaya and other independent grocers in Michigan weren’t just struggling to restock shelves. They were trying to figure out how to deal with Michigan’s increasingly rattled supply chain as the coronavirus outbreak brings much of the state’s economy to a near halt.
“We’re getting regular communications about the challenges they’re having and what they’re doing to keep the gears moving,” Antaya said of suppliers and distributors who provide food and supplies to Tom’s stores in Portland and Okemos.
Delivery trucks were late Tuesday for meat, dairy, produce, bakery items as well as health goods — he said. And at times recently, the vehicles have been only half full.
As independent grocers fret, Kroger, the nation’s largest chain, said it will be just fine, even as it asked customers to be patient. Kroger shortened hours in some stores and had workers stocking shelves around the clock following runs on certain items.
“(A)s long as customers just buy what they need and don’t hoard, there will be no problems at all – there’s plenty of food in the supply chain,” Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen told the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Grocers were first rattled more than a week ago as buyers, unnerved by COVID-19 cases in Michigan, swiped shelves bare of meat, bread, eggs, hand sanitizers and cleaning supplies, and — the topic of countless memes and conversations — toilet paper.
“Shoppers panicked and were buying triple of what they normally do,” said Healther Aro, store manager of a Pat’s Foods in Hancock in the Keweenaw Peninsula. “That meant we’re ordering triple of what we normally do, and warehouses just aren’t equipped to handle triple the orders in the same amount of time.”
Complicating matters is that some Michigan businesses that process, package or deliver meat, dairy and other goods report they’re having trouble staying fully staffed, according to officials at the Michigan Department of Agriculture & Rural Development.
Some workers —those milking cows on dairy farms, warehouse workers or delivery drivers — may be sick or fearful of getting sick, but there have been other reasons, too, said Brad Deacon, emergency management coordinator at the agriculture department.
A flurry of state emergency orders that shuttered some businesses may have left workers confused about showing up for shifts. Other workers have had to stay home with children as schools closed, he said.
That has kinked parts of Michigan’s supply chain at processing sites and loading docks.
Tom Johnson of Milan-based Bill Johnson & Son Wholesale Meats made rounds to Detroit meat packing sites Saturday, Monday and Tuesday to pick up meat for a dozen or small grocers in four southeast counties.
He was able to collect “about 20 percent of what I ordered.”
He said demand overwhelmed meat producers, as Michiganders hunker down for the outbreak and “learn to cook” at home. He said the pressure most likely will let up in the next two weeks, but for now?
“Whatever you can buy, you can sell. But there’s nothing out there to buy,” he told Bridge, adding that he’d received a text from a meat packing client a few minutes earlier.
“There will be no pork until some time next week,” Johnson said of the text message.
