Meat Supply Shortage

If you pay attention to the news you can see most of the supply chain breakage coming before it hits the stores. By mid-April we started hearing reports of COVID-19 outbreaks in meat processing plants across the country. The processing plants had to close while they cleaned facilities and tested employees. Because these plants require lots of employees to work very closely to each other you can see how easily these outbreaks occur in these facilities. As more plants had outbreaks meat processing slowed. Farmers have animals ready that need to be processed but there is limited processing capacity and therefore limited supply for grocery stores. On May 6 Hy-Vee, along with many other grocery stores started limiting the amount of meat you could purchase. We stocked up well before the shortage so we have a good supply. However, we were unable to purchase ground beef and frozen chicken breasts on our last Costco run - it was all sold out. It will be interesting to see how serious this shortage becomes.