Grocery executives at retailers including Walmart Inc. WMT 0.71% and Costco Wholesale Corp. COST 1.69% worry supplies of some products could run short just as demand is surging.
“I have not seen beef sales and all protein behave this way since the Atkins Diet days,” when shoppers bought up meat as part of the low- carb diet, said Jeff Lyons, senior vice president of fresh food for Costco. The warehouse chain is considering new suppliers to shore up its meat supplies, he said.
Tyson, the biggest U.S. meat company by sales, on Thursday temporarily closed a Washington state beef plant, after closing two Midwestern pork plants on Wednesday that produce millions of pounds of meat, together slaughtering nearly 35,000 hogs daily. Smithfield Foods Inc., Cargill Inc., JBS USA Holdings Inc. and Hormel Foods Corp. have closed plants over the past month, leading to significant declines in overall U.S. meat production.
Last week U.S. beef production fell 24% compared with a month earlier, with pork off 20% and poultry down 10%, according to estimates from CoBank, an agricultural lender.
Some meat orders are arriving incomplete as suppliers pull back on variety and major plants remain closed, grocery executives said. Ground-beef supplies are declining, a regional grocery executive said, and wholesale prices are creeping up after a fall that occurred when closed dining rooms clipped restaurant demand. – read more
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