re: Today (4-13-20) was the first sign of big disruption I’ve seen in food chain

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Without all the restaurants and cruise industry demand has plummeted.

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It's an interesting study. We don't really hurt for manufacturing and production in these items that we've seen empty shelves for. We don't buy toilet paper, eggs, milk, or meat from other countries. What we're hurting for is packaging and supply chain agility.

For instance, think about all that toilet paper that's produced for commercial customers that comes just packed in a giant cardboard box for bulk buyers. That's not packaged for resale, nor are the retail supply lines equipped to handle that kind of bulk. It's not that we can't make enough toilet paper, because we were able to meet all of our shite ticket needs before. When you try to funnel it through one type of outlet, though, you get where we are today.

Same thing with foodstuffs. Meat's not as big a deal as stores can buy whole sides of beef or whole pigs and hire butchers to break that down and package. As long as they can get the carcass from the slaughterhouse to the store, they're good. Reefer truck availability may be the bottleneck there. But think about milk, eggs, butter, etc. We made more than enough of all of that for all of our needs, but restaurants buy eggs by the flat and butter by like 50 pound bricks and that just doesn't work if someone only needs a dozen eggs and a pound of butter. Again, the packaging and distribution for retail vs. commercial is a huge hurdle to overcome.

One thing this has taught it's that companies who are seeing their products bottlenecking at the packaging lines and distribution networks should probably be trying to find economic ways they can be more agile and pivot to push their products through whatever supply channels remain available in a crisis.