Where’s the Food?
Several years ago, I sat in on a meeting while a mind-boggling statistic was revealed. For the first time in history, the consumption of prepared food by the food service industry, had surpassed that of grocery store utilization. Decades in the making, fifty-one percent of all food now came from an entity other than your grocer.
Staggering figures, though I wasn’t surprised. Households with two working adults, children and activities don’t leave much time for meal prep. Hearing those figures, I was particularly fascinated by how vital restaurants and food service providers are in sustaining such a large piece of the American economy. With that shift, home cooking became the alternative rather than the mainstay, and the productiveness of others providing our most basic need had become essential.
Quarantines, fear and uncertainty has left our population shell shocked. We were stunned by the empty grocery shelves and blamed people for hoarding. To a small extent, it was. But frankly, those shelves were not a result of ‘no food available.’ It was created by the shift of supplying consumers their forty nine percent of typical household usage to suddenly over ninety percent of consumption needs, with little more than a weeks’ notice. The supply chain has been turned upside down.
The stores have caught up. Now, here’s the rub. The discrepancy of normal business percentages compared to the current affair of temporary limits controlled by need basis, is wacko. And the stress does not rest entirely upon the restaurants that you normally patronize in multiplicity. This runs all the way up the chain. Every vendor of eating establishments and their vendors, such as distributors, wholesalers, beverage suppliers, refrigeration workers, linen services, paper suppliers, etc., the list goes on - will suffer the consequences of their clientele’s establishments shut down. Food service providers operate on slim margins with the great risk.
Let me explain that fifty one percent that we have come to rely on –
Right now, our restaurateurs are operating on less than ten percent of normal sales. That is only five percent of consumable production. If your pre-quarantine standard was three meals a day, seven days a week, your former ‘outside the home’ intake was eleven meals a week. On average, the consumer is currently only ordering one meal per week. The numbers match.
Most of you are helping out by ordering one curbside a week. Good, but less than ten percent of the previous standard. You want your restaurants to be there when life gets back to normal, so why not pick your top four places you frequent and increase to four or five take-out meals a week? Less than half of what you used to do, but it helps pay the bills. Don’t forget your favorite breakfast places too. If you truly want to help make a difference in an attempt to help our economy rebound and return to some kind of normalcy, move toward a commitment to ordering out.
Better yet, cover two entities with one swipe. Support both your restauranteur and someone affected by this pandemic by purchasing a gift card. Remember those on the front lines. Our nurses and doctors don’t have time to run a household, much less cook for their families. Essential workers are in overtime. Remember them! No better way to say thank you to those who are holding our lives together.
And don’t dismiss the franchises - most are independently owned. Nothing is safer than a pizza cooked at 450 degrees! Let’s remember the industry that has been feeding you over fifty-one percent of the time.