Grocery store shelves depleted of food and other products when the nation began seeing increasing cases of COVID-19, are starting to fill up again.
“As consumers continue to reduce their demand and just buy what they need, we’re starting to see things catch up,” Greg Ferrara, president and CEO of the National Grocers Association. The group is based in Arlington, Virginia, and it represents many independent grocers in the U.S.
The grocery runs that were recently seen in stores were unprecedented.
“I don’t believe there is any industry or any country in the world that could have planned for the amount of demand at that we saw in the first two weeks of this crisis,” Ferrara said.
Over the past weeks, many manufacturers have retooled their strategies to get more products out, Ferrara said.
One way that is being done is by focusing on producing one size of a product, instead of several sizes, in order to get shipments out.
However, there are some products continuing to fly off the shelves, such as chicken, ground beef and flour, as more people cook at home. Frozen foods, eggs and paper towels are also going fast.
Yet the highest demand continues to be for toilet paper.
“We’ve never seen so much demand for an item, really having run through months’ worth of supplies in a matter of a weeks,” Ferrara said.
Cleaners, disinfectants and hand sanitizers are also not easy to find, but Ferrara said there could be a potential explanation for why those shipments are not coming in.
“I think some of these items are probably also being diverted to health care and other facilities that definitely need them right now,” Ferrara said.
Store employees, Ferrara said, have been given the name of “Supermarket Super Heroes” because of the long hours they are working and the trying conditions many experience.
“They’re doing it because they want to serve their community; they’re doing it because they realize the vital service that food stores are providing to these communities,” he said.
Ferrara reminds shoppers to not engage in panic buying and to have patience while shopping, as there will still be items that cannot be found at stores.
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