by Megan Minnick, Purchasing Director
What will the ongoing effects of COVID-19 be on our food system? Like so many questions in this turbulent time, this is an incredibly hard one to answer. Our global and local food supply chains have never experienced anything quite like this, so we have no real experience to guide our predictions.
What I can say with certainty is that, at least in terms of the local food system, what is to happen is entirely up to us, the eaters. How will our community of food producers and consumers face this challenge together? This is history that is being written, and is entirely up to us.
The pandemic stock-up
What exactly happened in the global and national food supply chain this spring? With all of the gaps on store shelves, it is easy to jump to the conclusion that our national supply of some foods (and hand sanitizer, and toilet paper) simply ran out. In the short term at least—that’s more or less true.
Our food supply chain begins with farms and factories and ends with the people who eat the food, either at home or in restaurants. In between—at least for the larger national and global supply chain—there may be multiple warehouses and distributors, not to mention the trucks, boats, trains, and planes that move the food from link to link in the chain.
For a glimpse at exactly how the shortages happened, take a look at this sales graph. It shows daily sales growth (by percent) for certain items at Willy Street Co-op during the month of March. The dotted orange line shows growth that we would typically assume our supply chain can handle—sales growth from items we put on sale, for example. From farmers to factories, to warehouses and retailers, our supply chain is set up for something like 100% fluctuation in sales levels. Not surprisingly, 1,000% growth posed a bit of a problem; especially when you consider that it was happening across the country. Everything that was in all of those middle links of the supply chain—the distributors, the warehouses, the retailers—simply ran out.
If grocery stores and our suppliers had been prepared for this huge national stock-up, we could perhaps have handled it better. The food supply chain is able to handle crazy fluctuations during events such as Thanksgiving, but the difference is that Thanksgiving is extremely predictable. There are months and months of planning that go into making sure that we have enough turkey, cranberries, and canned pumpkin to meet the holiday demand. Vendors make more products in preparation, extra storage is secured, extra shipments are scheduled, and we order products months in advance based on historical demand. This pandemic stock-up event hit hard and it hit quickly, and unfortunately, no one had time to prepare.
The good news is that in the longer term, there’s no doubt that these supply chains will catch up. Paper mills are still making toilet paper, farmers are still growing potatoes, and over a matter of weeks, or perhaps a few months, supplies of all of these items will catch up and store shelves will go back to their regular stock levels. The toilet paper that you buy today may be the freshest toilet paper that you’ve ever used!
Local is both more flexible and more fragile
One thing that emerged as a silver lining for us here at the Co-op is the strength that our relationships with small and local suppliers give us. Here are just a few examples:
• Hand Sanitizer. Just look at the blue line on that graph, and you can see that hand sanitizer was one of the first, and hardest hit stock-up items in March. Where you see the line dip down is not a dip in demand, but simply an indicator that our stores were completely out of stock.
In mid-March, we received an email from Amanda Biederman, who years ago worked at Willy East in the Wellness Department. She had since started a bodycare company in Lake Geneva called SaiOm Organics, and she was inquiring to know if we would be interested in selling her hand sanitizer. Oh boy, would we! At a time when our shelves would otherwise be completely bare of hand sanitizer, we were able to stock Amanda’s fantastic local product.
• Potatoes. The COVID-19 stock-up caught the potato market at the wrong time. March is already a tricky time for potatoes; the Washington and Wisconsin storage crops are just finishing up, and the new California crop isn’t quite ready. We are usually able to scrape by and keep potatoes in stock, but typically there’s not a huge potato demand in March —people are much more interested in buying fresh spring crops like asparagus and leafy greens. When the huge stock-up on non-perishable foods like potatoes happened, the nation’s potato supply almost completely dried up.
Here again, a local relationship saved the day. When potatoes were hard to come by from other sources, we were able to turn to our friends at Vermont Valley Community Farm for help. We used to buy potatoes, garlic, and a few other crops from Vermont Valley. Years ago, they stopped selling to us in order to devote more of their attention to their large CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and seed potato business. More recently, they discontinued their CSA and focused on growing seed potatoes to sell to other farmers. On a whim, we asked them about their supplies, and we were in luck! Vermont Valley was able to fill our shelves with both bulk and 5lb bags of three varieties of high-quality local, organic potatoes.
While it is absolutely true that the national and global food supply chain has weathered this storm and will continue more or less unchanged, the same cannot be said with certainty of our local food supply chain. Yes, there is a certain kind of strength in our local relationships, but there is also a vulnerability that exists within local supply chains, especially right now when so many of our local suppliers are dealing with the fallout from climate change.
In January, the Produce Managers and I held our annual planning meetings with the farmers who supply us. We heard a similar story from many of them: climate change is an increasingly serious threat. They had just weathered two of the worst growing seasons in memory—2018 and 2019 were both incredibly wet years, with weird weather patterns that made profitable farming very difficult. On top of that, CSA subscriptions in the Madison area are down significantly from where they were several years ago. More than one of our established and experienced growers told us that in order to continue, they simply had to have a good season in 2020.
Then COVID-19 hit. Typically, our local farmers and small producers make their living by a combination of CSA shares, wholesale accounts to grocery stores (like Willy Street Co-op), farmers’ markets, and restaurant sales. With CSAs already on the wane, restaurant sales diminished greatly due to the COVID-19 crisis, and farmers’ markets largely delayed, many farmers and producers have found themselves with significantly less income than they had planned for. If this crisis had hit two years ago, before the 2018 and 2019 growing season, many of them probably could have weathered this storm, but with diminished reserves, this is an extremely dangerous situation for many local producers.
This is where we come in. Not we as in Willy Street Co-op—although your Co-op certainly has a part to play—but we as in the community of eaters in Dane County, Wisconsin.
What does the future hold?
We have become accustomed to living in one of the country's most vibrant and thriving local food communities, and it’s very easy to take that for granted. We are now at a crossroads—we can no longer take it for granted. We must all work to ensure that 2020 is as profitable for our local farmers as it can be, otherwise, many of them may not be here in 2021. That may sound pessimistic, but I sincerely hope that it can serve as a call to action. We are writing this history together, and it is entirely up to us how it turns out.
What can we do? It’s not hard! Joanna from FairShare CSA Coalition provided a wonderful list of ways to support local producers in her article in this Reader. Check it out and pick something that’s doable for you. Our community is strong, and together we can do this.