Canned food boom means boom in cans
The restaurants in downtown Hannibal, Mo., have been closed for weeks because of the coronavirus, but on the town’s western outskirts, its largest employer is buzzing.
The big General Mills plant that turns out cans of Progresso soup is still operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, just as it was before the virus hit. It employs 1,000 people and is hiring to fill 50 openings.
“I drove by the other day, and the parking lot was full of cars, trucks coming and going,” said James Hark, a manager of an auto body shop and mayor of Hannibal, the boyhood home of Mark Twain.
Someone has to make all those cans. The demand for processed foods like canned soups and vegetables during the pandemic has rippled through the food industry’s supply chain. Makers of metal containers have had to speed up production to keep pace.
Take Silgan Holdings, a maker of metal and plastic containers for consumer goods with more than 50 plants across the country. The Connecticut company reported record firstquarter earnings, in part because of a jump in demand for cans.
Another big maker of food and beverage cans, Crown Holdings, went into the year planning to increase production in the United States, and the virus has only added urgency to the effort. Crown’s website lists 81 open production jobs at its 25 U.S. plants, some for a third production line being set up at a factory in Nichols, N.Y. “We can sell every can we can make,” said Thomas Fischer, vice president for investor relations and corporate affairs.
Acquiring the metal hasn’t been a problem. Despite the tariffs the Trump administration placed on imported steel and other metals, steel prices have eased this year. Moreover, recycling provides can producers with a reliable source — about 71% of steel food containers are recycled, according to the Can Manufacturers Institute, a trade group.
Smaller suppliers are busy as well. About 25 miles northwest of Chicago, Apex Tool Works makes the machines and tools that produce metal cans and lids.
“We are actually swamped,” said Mike Collins, president of Apex, the company his family has run for 101 years. “The soup shelves are practically empty in the supermarkets, so our customers can’t make the stuff fast enough, and they’re running through their tooling very quickly.”
Collins said that he would like to add to his staff of 42, but that workers with the required machine and metalworking skills are difficult to come by. “It was like that even before the virus, so we haven’t hired in a while,” he said.
The food business is normally steady. But the rise in sales of canned and other packaged foods, when transportation companies and vegetable producers have been knocked off stride by the virus, has forced manufacturers into a state of high alert.
In the four weeks that ended April 4, food sales at General Mills and Campbell Soup rose more than 60%, and Kraft Heinz, Kellogg, Flower Foods and others had jumps of 37% to 50%, according to Nielsen, a provider of data on consumer purchasing.
“Almost all our plants are running at capacity,” John Church, General Mills’ chief supply chain officer, said in an interview. The company has 25 plants in North America.
For years, sales of soups and other canned foods have been declining slowly as Americans gravitated toward fresh produce and other options often seen as more nutritious. In 2017, General Mills closed a large Progresso soup plant in New
Jersey and consolidated production of that product line in Hannibal.
But lockdown orders have made shoppers cut down on trips to the supermarket and stock up on longlasting items. The food industry calls this “pantryloading.”
Jim Parr, a teacher in Framingham, Mass., is an example. Ordinarily, he said, if he buys a can of beans and a can of diced tomatoes to make chili, it’s a spurofthemoment decision while shopping. But recently, he stocked up.
“I got enough to last two weeks,” he said. “I can’t just drive out at any time to go to the store. The way it is now, you have to think ahead more.”
To meet demand, General Mills is in the unusual position of hiring during a pandemic, and not just in Hannibal. A plant in Wellston, Ohio — a town of fewer than 6,000 people — has 30 openings, a mix of entrylevel and midcareer jobs.
At some locations, General Mills has recruited office workers to help staff factories now running around the clock. Overall, absenteeism hasn’t been a problem, Church said. Having confronted the virus in its plants in China, the company began screening workers and sanitizing plants in the United States early on to limit any spread of the virus in the workplace, he said.
Campbell Soup has also had a jump in demand for canned products. It has increased pay for production workers by $2 an hour to help its employees juggling work hours with the new challenges of child care and stayathome orders.