Retail Watchers

Due to shortages on wings, some restaurants have switched to trying to sell thighs prepared like wings. Notably Wing Stop. So it could be the supply of thighs that was going to the supermarkets is being shifted over to some food service groups now.

Over the weekend I went in a couple supermarkets in the north Orange County area. One was an Albertsons and the other Ralphs. It's the first time it was clearly obvious how bad out of stocks are. The Albertsons did a good job of facing the shelves to make them look okay, but there was nothing behind the front facing in lots of sections. The sections that were really bad were the DSD crackers and cookies where there were 10 facings of Ritz crackers to make up for missing items. The cereal aisle was similar. There was only one brand and size of cream cheese available. In the freezer section they filled in out-of-stock areas with store brand pizza. Ralphs was pretty much the same, but they didn't do quite as good of a job to cover up the obvious.

Ever since the pandemic started, the stock has never fully returned to normal. Pasta always to seems to be a problem, though it looks like bagels seem to have come back. It also looks like yogurt and other dairy products is facing shortages.

I was at the Leesburg Aldi this weekend and, believe it or not, for the first time in 4-5 months they have Applewood Sausage back on the shelf!

No idea where's it been but glad to have it back - bought a lot to blackmail my brother into making homemade pizza!

It's not directly about supermarkets, but I can tell you within my food service operation, the weirdest things have been out of stock or discontinued. For instance, we have ketchup pump dispensers but we haven't been able to use them because we can get all the ketchup we want but the plastic package that goes inside the pump has been impossible for the distributor to source. Another one - grape juice, which our distributor stopped selling in the concentrate/fountain type. For a while we had trouble getting un-popped popcorn, and now we can only get one that contains coconut (which we try to avoid for allergen reasons). Same for oil - our preferred canola or vegetable oils have been in short supply, meaning we have to switch to a lot of soybean oil, which again is not ideal for allergies. So there are no big out-of-stocks like key meat or carbohydrate items, at least not as bad as it was, but there are items that come up here and there all the time now.

Food shortages seem to be random but they are happening. I have commented about WinCo and many of their private label products not being in stock consistently. I have also noticed, at several stores, certain varieties of frozen foods as well as cereals have become hard to find. On one recent trip I couldn't find any plain crackers of any kind. And I have seen odd produce shortages which are not typical, such as WinCo being completely out of bananas a couple times.

Walmart and some other big chains had to charter their own container ships to keep merchandise in stock. Winco probably is still limited by the port problems and the cargo ship traffic jam.

Ukraine was the world's top exporter of sunflower oil. Now the sunflower oil and sunflower seed supplies are cut off. Indonesia has cut off palm oil supplies. The lower soybean crop in South America has reduced the world's supply.

Sunflower oil was cheaper than palm or soybean oil. Now that sunflower oil is stuck at Ukraine ports, the price of palm oil and soybean oil is going up like crazy.

There are shortages of all other kinds of food oil now as sunflower oil is no longer an option.

India uses a huge amount of sunflower oil and is now buying sunflower oil from Russia at a hugely inflated price. Russia is making out like a bandit.

The price of all kinds of food will go up as food oil shortages limit production of all kinds of food. Imported food made in India will go up.

Dollar Tree used to have many made in India items. They were cheap, but with oil prices up we may not see as many Indian items at dollar stores any more.

Ukraine is a major source of wheat for Europe and the rest of the world. Without Ukraine's wheat, there will be shortages and higher prices. The one good thing is that the U.S. could get more sales of wheat. The U.S. needs to step and and produce more cooking oil and more wheat. We should not depend on foreign countries for our basic necessities.

Shopped Safeway tonight and the number of out of stocks in the store was unreal. They put "blue tape" on shelf tags of items that are warehouse outs. There are hundreds of items with blue tape, all over the store. For some reason perishables are stocked pretty good, the problems seem to all be on the dry aisles.

They also seem to have a new scheme going where they put shelf tags in front of items that show no price. Saw this on the Kraft Grated Parmesan Cheeses tonight- a weird shelf tag that has all of the description/size/etc. information on it but no price.

Also noticed they are discontinuing the private label canned "homestyle" soups. These used to occupy shelf space between Progresso and Chunky but were more of a Progresso knockoff. NorCal sold them at 2.99. They did not do a clearance but rather a sell through leftover stock at full retail. I guess Progresso at 4.79 wanted all of the space.

Odd to see them eliminating private label with such outrageous prices. They should be keeping private label. Similar screw up in the frozen food department- now they are $4.99+ regular price on all small basic frozen meals. They call $4 a sale price for Stouffers. Meanwhile the private label shows up every now and then at 2.25 but still isn't slotted on the regular aisle.

Maybe Albertsons should make a deal with these brands who obviously buy space in exchange for the private label being eliminated- give us a break on cost so we can have an everyday low price set at 5% above Wal Mart (like Kroger does in many categories).

The aluminum can shortage and the vegetable shortage is affecting many items. Russia is a supplier of much of the world's fertilizer. Without fertilizer, crops will be in shorter supply and much more expensive. There are many third world countries that rely on Russian fertilizer. Russia is trying to starve the world to gain leverage. Poverty politics...

Here in the Seattle area, Fred Meyer and QFC have been our of Kroger Carbmaster Original Reduced Sugar Milk for about 3 weeks. For being an extremely low carb, filtered and high protein product and non fat, it is very tasty. It is my absolute favorite milk as it is good on Weight Watchers. i have called Kroger customer service and they say it is still an active product. Plus most of the dairy at Fred Meyer and QFC comes from Fred Meyer's Swan Island Dairy processing facilities. So it's not that far. The strange thing is that they still have the chocolate version of the product. You'd think that if there is chocolate, there would be white milk of the same product. But I am about to give up on this product!