Grocery supply line pushed to the brink
Jackie Plaskowitz went to her local Winn-Dixie supermarket three days after Hurricane Irma, hoping to find fresh vegetables and meat for dinner.
Produce, dairy and frozen food aisles were blocked off. Employees tossed spoiled food into carts to be thrown out. She settled for a can of Chef Boyardee mini raviolis.
“There isn’t anything here,” said Plaskowitz, who returned to work cleaning homes on Thursday. “I thought I would be able to find something for dinner, but there aren’t even any fresh fruits and vegetables.”
Hurricane Irma has pushed Florida’s grocery supply line to the brink, leaving shelves empty of staples days after the storm passed. Even a full week after the storm, some stores had empty spaces and shortages of basic items.
Despite lessons learned from multiple hurricanes in 2004 and 2005, store operators said they have never dealt with a storm that impacted nearly the entire state, leaving 60 percent of Florida without power and some communities with wind and flooding damage. Watching Irma’s long, powerful march toward Florida for more than a week also taxed supplies, giving shoppers a reason to stock up on a big scale.
Some stores couldn’t operate because of outages; some couldn’t get food because distribution lines were slowed down. When they did open, much of their perishable food had spoiled. There was a surge in demand from customers who hadn’t shopped in days and saw food spoil.
Stores and retail analysts say Hurricane Irma’s size and path made it the perfect storm to cripple Florida’s grocery supply lines.
“In terms of damaging the state’s infrastructure of power and clogging roads, Irma’s about as bad as we’ve ever seen,” said Mark Johnston, a professor who studies retail at Rollins College, Crummer Graduate School of Business. “Store’s can’t run without power and trucks were held up for three days or more.”
Irma showed the strength and weaknesses of the modern food distribution system, where stores rely on daily deliveries of fresh food, Johnston said.
Most regions have a three-day supply of food in supermarkets and distribution centers, said Kim Zueli, who recently wrote about natural disasters’ impact on cities in a report for Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, a Boston-based think tank. The organization is trying to educate cities about ways to keep people fed during natural disasters — including keeping larger supplies of food on hand, bolstering food banks and providing better access for grocery-store trucks.
“Cities need better planning; they need to plan for what happens when you can’t access food at all,” Zueli said. “I think food systems need to be seen as a critical system.”
Big grocery chains have backup plans if one or even a few stores can’t open. “But there is no plan for what to do when an entire region is out of commission, Zueli said. “That’s what happened in Florida, an entire state that couldn’t do much of anything.”.
The state’s nine largest population centers, from Fort Myers to Jacksonville, faced major damage from the storm.
The long, uncertain approach of the storm is what James Miller, Florida Retail Federation spokesman, identified as a unique issue about Irma. The storm is tied with a 1932 hurricane for the longest time spent as a Category 5 hurricane.
“Both the size of the storm and the unpredictability of the storm on the front end led to the shortages of food, fuel and water,” Miller said. “And after the storm, from a retailing perspective, you had to restock the whole state as opposed to a few cities.”
Immediately after Irma passed, Florida Retail Federation communicated with law enforcement in hard-hit areas, such as the Keys, to allow trucks back in to restock stores, Miller said.
While grocery supply lines started running about 24 hours after the storm passed in Central Florida, retailers are still dealing with the repercussions as they try to restock.
T.G. Lee stopped distributing milk from its Orlando center during the storm. When it returned, it initially limited production to the most popular varieties, 2 percent and whole, said Jamaison Schuler, a spokesman for parent company Dean Foods.
At one point after the storm, Publix published a social media post from CEO Todd Jones, pleading with customers to have patience while they restocked stores following Hurricane Irma.
On Sunday evening in the Publix at the Shoppes of Eastwood in east Orange, milk and bread were scarce, and there were no cases of bottled water; only sixpacks of water were available.
Winn-Dixie spokesman Joe Caldwell said it took days to evaluate every store in the chain for damage and to figure out when it could reopen. Some stores had standing water inside.
The world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart, only opened a few stores the day following the storm. Some stayed closed until Wednesday or Thursday as the company waited for electricity and cleared spoiled goods out of stores, spokesman Ragan Dickens said.
“In some stores, we are at a total loss from a perishables standpoint,” Dickens said. “There were distribution centers that were closed for a period of time.”