Originally Posted by ARCOgraphite
With most restaurants closed, there should be plenty of meat products spoiling or aging somewhere.
...
The products are spoiling - the live animals are being euthanized and disposed of as the processing plants to butcher them are being closed or significantly slowed down due to the current pandemic.
As an example, a large hog processing facility in the state had roughly 1/3rd of its employees test positive for COVID-19. The plant in normal times processes 21,000 hogs a day. No, that is not a typo.
Shut the plant down, where do the finished hogs go in the meantime? They are taking up the space in the barn where the younger piglets would start filling. As the hogs get too big, they are no longer easy to process - these plants are designed for animals in a typical size range. The solution is to euthanize the older hogs, and dispose of them.
But divert the animals to a local butcher so they don't go to waste I hear. Sounds like a great idea, except butchers here are booked out to July at this point, and they don't have the capacity to pick up 20+ thousand hogs a day, multiplied by multiple plants...
Thus the current decreases in stock (much less is backfilling what we are using) and changes in pricing.
The same is happening in other meat lines - even Wendy's is running out of beef in some locations.
We've changed so much of our manufacturing and processing to be just in time and keyed in to certain supply lines. When things were setup for institutional delivery, suppliers can't turn on a dime and individually cut and pack to consumer level packing like that... A farmer I know only has packaging and equipment for potatoes for institutional and restaurant users - what home consumer wants 50 lb bags of potatoes?
Countless examples of this across the industry...
With most restaurants closed, there should be plenty of meat products spoiling or aging somewhere.
...
The products are spoiling - the live animals are being euthanized and disposed of as the processing plants to butcher them are being closed or significantly slowed down due to the current pandemic.
As an example, a large hog processing facility in the state had roughly 1/3rd of its employees test positive for COVID-19. The plant in normal times processes 21,000 hogs a day. No, that is not a typo.
Shut the plant down, where do the finished hogs go in the meantime? They are taking up the space in the barn where the younger piglets would start filling. As the hogs get too big, they are no longer easy to process - these plants are designed for animals in a typical size range. The solution is to euthanize the older hogs, and dispose of them.
But divert the animals to a local butcher so they don't go to waste I hear. Sounds like a great idea, except butchers here are booked out to July at this point, and they don't have the capacity to pick up 20+ thousand hogs a day, multiplied by multiple plants...
Thus the current decreases in stock (much less is backfilling what we are using) and changes in pricing.
The same is happening in other meat lines - even Wendy's is running out of beef in some locations.
We've changed so much of our manufacturing and processing to be just in time and keyed in to certain supply lines. When things were setup for institutional delivery, suppliers can't turn on a dime and individually cut and pack to consumer level packing like that... A farmer I know only has packaging and equipment for potatoes for institutional and restaurant users - what home consumer wants 50 lb bags of potatoes?
Countless examples of this across the industry...
