Grocery shoppers had a rough go of it in 2020 between the limited store hours,
social distancing, and food shortages. As if this year wasn't stressful enough,
many shoppers found themselves looking at empty store shelves when it came to these certain items.
For both experienced home bakers and budding bread-makers, the early months of the COVID-19
pandemic brought additional challenges. As they braved the grocery store aisles, many noticed
some seriously empty shelves. For some shoppers, in fact, it was all but impossible to find flour.
The flour shortage may have been frustrating, but it provided a silver lining for businesses
like King Arthur Flour. According to Marker, the relatively small flour milling company has been in
continuous business since 1790 and was already known for high quality goods. In early 2020,
the flour maker experienced an upswing in orders so massive that, as Adweek reports, their sales
rose more than 2,000 percent. This period of time was so busy that it was briefly difficult for them
to fulfill orders, as it was for many other flour producers and distributors throughout the country.
King Arthur and other companies have since beefed up their production
and distribution networks have changed to accommodate demand. Yet, there was a brief
moment where you may not have found much flour on your local grocery store shelf.
People more or less stuck at home were forced to practice patience,
or else had to get creative in the kitchen as they baked bread, pastries, and other treats.
While some people under stay at home orders turned to extra work in the kitchen to stay occupied,
others went for more easy solutions. No judgement here, as sometimes you just want a simple meal
practically ready to go as soon as you pull it out of the pantry. Yet, that option also
got a little more difficult, as manufacturers of things like canned soup were overwhelmed.
MarketWatch reports that shortages of items like canned soup were still happening in the fall.
General Mills, which makes Progresso soup, stated that it hadn't yet caught up to demand.
That same situation rings true over at Campbell Soup Company, which has also struggled to keep
up with the amount of soup consumers have been packing into their shopping carts.
It's not entirely surprising: after all, with the way the year has been,
who doesn't want some good, old-fashioned comfort food?
Luckily, we didn't experience a complete beer shortage this year, but you may have noticed a
few of your craft favorites missing from stores. That's because breweries, especially smaller ones
with smaller financial cushions than the big guys, were hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Statista reports that, amongst the breweries polled, more than 60 percent had to throttle
back their production, while just under 30 percent had to stop making beers entirely.
The Brewers Association echoed these finds, saying that their members have seen a precipitous drop in
sales over the past year. That meant layoffs, furloughs, and sluggish production,
largely because of social distancing measures that have kept taprooms closed.
Even if you have tried to buy beer off the premises of a brewery,
chances are good that you've seen fewer brews from local makers.
Some, sadly, may have already stopped production while others are staring
down the barrel of what many are calling an existential threat to the brewing industry.
People have long been in love with the phenomenon that is the Costco sheet cake,
at least until recently. And that's not because Costco encountered a rival in the great arena
of grocery store sheet cakes, but because it ran up against none other than the COVID-19 pandemic.
The New York Times reports that Costco made the decision to cut back service in a few places,
in order to help limit person-to-person contact. It's an understandable decision,
given the need to keep people safe, but it's still been hard to swallow.
Graduations and birthday parties aren't the same, but that was kind of the entire point.
By July, according to USA Today, some consumers were reporting that they had found the longed-for
cakes in their local Costco. Now, that's no guarantee that you'll find the same near you,
as Costco told reporters that the sheet cake was still shuttered for the time being. For now, let's
simply say that this sign is enough for us to take hope that this sheet cake shortage is not forever.
If you happen to be of a certain age and in possession of a dedicated sweet tooth,
then you may recall the heyday of Dunkaroos. The cookie and frosting combo was ultra-popular in the
1990s, proving to be the crown jewel in a kid's lunchbox. However, the snack was doomed to a slow,
lingering demise, at one point buoyed along only by the sheer force of nostalgia.
"Can you believe what's possible these days? Email! With color and pictures!"
Alas, even that longing for a lost childhood could only support Dunkaroos for a short while. General
Mills, which manufactured the treat, closed up its Dunkaroo program in 2012. Nostalgia can
still be a pretty strong force and Dunkaroos were actually set to make a comeback in early 2020.
Great news! Except, well, where are they? Quite a few Twitter users have reported they
can't find the stuff in their local stores. If you're in the same unfortunate boat,
that may be because, according to The Wall Street Journal, General Mills is one of many
companies still struggling to shore up inventory and increase production amidst the pandemic.
During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the folks sheltering in their homes
and limiting their grocery store visits faced the long slog of hours spent in
the same space. A good portion of those people decided that, with all the extra hours inside,
baking would be an appropriately time-consuming and tasty way to learn a new skill.
Turns out that, since so many people had the same idea,
more than a few key baking ingredients started disappearing from shops,
leaving disconcertingly empty spots in their wake. In addition to the flour shortages
that cropped up, there's another roadblock that popped up to bread-making adventures.
You also need yeast, those friendly microscopic fungi that help doughs rise. However,
according to Slate, yeast has also ghosted some of us. The twist here is that it's
the shortage of packaging materials that have got manufacturers behind.
Now you could be extra intrepid and grow your own bread starter with wild yeast
that's constantly floating in the air around us. But, that takes extra time and yields sourdough:
if that's not your style, you may have to wait and enjoy some flatbread in the meantime.
"How'd this oven door get open?"
Trendy food items may fly off the shelves under normal circumstances, but this year
has added an extra level of complexity courtesy of everyone's pandemic pantry stocking. According to
Food & Wine, this means that, once everyone's at least tried to get things like flour,
beans, toilet paper, and other more or less essential stuff, it's time for oat milk.
Early on in the year, sales for the non-dairy beverage skyrocketed as people throughout the
United States and beyond prepared to shelter in place for an unknown period of time.
This meant, however, that some shoppers were left bereft of oat milk.
The New York Times reports that the shortage was still ongoing for various markets in the spring.
The rise of oat milk in coffee shops as a non dairy alternative
undoubtedly led many newly-minted home baristas to seek it out as they tried
to recreate their favorite coffee shop favorites with copycat recipes.
Oatly, one of the more popular brands of oat milk, has since ramped up production, meaning that some
who missed their trendy not-milk have hopefully seen it reappear in their grocery's cold case.
Sure, smoothies are one of those things that are relatively easy to make at home. Assuming
you have a blender or even a food processor, it's really a matter of throwing in some ingredients
and blending away to your heart's content. Then again, sometimes you're out and about,
and it's just nice to grab a relatively healthy prepackaged smoothie from a cold case somewhere.
So, why has the Coca-Cola Company decided to discontinue their Odwalla line of smoothies?
According to Eat This, Not That!, the culprit here is probably the amount of sugar that was
packed into a bottle of Odwalla. On average, they contained somewhere between 30 to 50
grams of sugar. That may have put consumers off, considering the growing push for less refined,
more overtly health-conscious offerings. Coca-Cola's attempt to put out a "Zero
Sugar" version of Odwalla didn't seem to help matters, and sales continued to plummet.
Before you panic completely, it's clear now that meat has made a comeback at
the grocery store and local butcher shops. Yet, for a while this year,
some disappointed carnivores found that their favorite cuts of meat were nowhere to be found.
Why? According to Vox, meat supply chains were significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Workers in meatpacking plants, often crammed together in tight quarters,
were disproportionately infected, leading to numerous plant closures.
This in turn created a bottleneck in the supply chain,
where the remaining plants that were open simply couldn't process meat fast enough.
Meanwhile, farmers had to make some tough decisions about whether or not
they could keep feeding their animals, which, if they were continued to be fed,
could grow too large to go through most processing plants.
All of this meant that consumers, whether they were shopping at a grocery store or
trying to pick up a hamburger from a favorite fast food restaurant,
often came up against shortages and high prices. Now, as The Wall Street Journal reports,
meat has returned to the butcher counter. However, a decreased demand for meat and
overproduction in the face of that bottleneck has led to plenty of sales simply to move products
out of the store. That may be good news for shoppers, but it's still got farmers worried.
Listen, there's no judgement here. We're all for doing it yourself,
whether that's baking your own bread, blending your own smoothies, or assembling your own pizzas.
Heck, you can even make your own pizza dough pretty easily. Then again, there are simply some
nights where you need a break. If you so choose to snag a frozen pizza on your next shopping trip,
storing it in anticipation of at least one easy dinner, it's fine. If you promise not
to tell pizza purists, there are even some frozen pizzas that are really good.
That is, if you can get your hands on one. In April, Ad Week reported that frozen pizzas
had become something of a rarity, despite dramatically increased production nationwide.
A four-week measure of the situation from late March into early April showed
that Americans bought an estimated $275 million worth of frozen pizzas in that time.
Analysts have pointed to the obvious culprit for many food shortages this year: the coronavirus
pandemic. Presumably, shoppers who have been quick or lucky enough to grab a frozen pizza before they
were gone from the freezer just wanted a simple, comforting meal while they were stuck at home.
“I didn't hear the delivery guy pull up." "That's because it's not delivery."
"Really."
"And it's not exactly pizza, either. It's Almost Pizza."
Veggie-friendly frozen foods brand Amy's Kitchen, long a favorite of time-crunched
vegetarians, has also been impacted by shortages and decreased demand.
It's gotten difficult enough that, as Bloomberg reports, the brand has scaled
back and even eliminated some of its offerings. The culprit is, perhaps now unsurprisingly,
the COVID-19 pandemic. As with so many other food industries, production and distribution has been
impacted by supply-chain disruptions and new consumer purchasing patterns.
Manufacturers also have to face restrictions like social distancing, which keeps workers safer but
can affect what's made in a factory and how often it rolls off the line.
For Amy's Kitchen, this means that they've had to enact new measures in an effort to
keep things afloat, including reducing their output from 228 products to a mere
71. Shoppers looking for a particular frozen vegan burrito
or other meal from Amy's Kitchen may be out of luck for the foreseeable future.
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