By today the closure of dine-in restaurants should be in full swing across almost all areas. Understandably there’s going to be an operational lag as many of those restaurants don’t have the systems or equipment in place for exclusive take-out or pick-up services (ie. carry-out containers); though hopefully many are responding quickly to the changes.

The upstream consequence of the restaurant disruption is going to be even more pressure on grocery outlets already seeing additional traffic. Many people now shifting from meals “outside the home”, back to the more traditional “home-cooked” meals etc. Which brings up the question of the retail supermarket capacity to meet that extra demand.

This coronavirus event is like a nationwide pre-Hurricane shopping experience.

There have been numerous reports of wide-scale shortages in retail food markets. On the positive side this experienced supply chain has the ability to scale-up very fast (depending on region). However, on a national scale this is the first time the entire country has needed this level of increased retail food distribution simultaneously. To cope with the volume most stores appear to have reduced their hours of operation.

Hopefully, by mid-week the first set of full recovery orders should have arrived at your local grocer from a very busy regional distribution network. Note: “recovery orders” are not regular store deliveries; they are prioritized emergency replenishments, specifically for these types of events.  They can arrive on top of regular orders and deliveries.

With that in mind what are you experiencing in your city, town or neighborhood market? Use the comment section to share your experience. How is the supply chain responding to the increased demand in your area?   Has the panic buying settled down?

Of particular interest would be anyone in Illinois and Ohio (or mid-west if impacted), or areas with less logistical familiarity with state-wide emergency food supply distribution.

Feel free to provide tips on anything you might deem valuable for others. Also, if there are cooking ideas you have for good and tasty meal suggestions, while maximizing budgets, feel free to share those too. I’ve read some of those creative rice dish discussions and they sound yummy….

So what’s going on in your neighborhood?

PS.  As with all emergencies, if anyone is in a crisis situation, especially if anyone is having trouble with basic needs, feel free to drop us an email and we’ll try to find a way to help.  There’s a lot of creative people hanging around these pages.