Side effect of pandemic: Garlic shortage
Home cooks, pandemic lead to a high demand; big harvest is expected
Barely a stone’s throw from the Garlic Capital of the World, the stinking rose has gone scarce.
Bay Area residents looking to put garlic in their shopping carts are in some cases coming up empty and in other cases spending more money as the coronavirus pandemic has helped create a shortage of the aromatic bulb.
While other factors have contributed to the deficit, the shelter-in-place orders are the main reason shoppers may be finding no garlic, unusually sized garlic or more-expensive garlic in grocery stores, said Ken Christopher, executive vice president of Christopher Ranch, the famed garlic producer from the famed garlic town of Gilroy.
People largely confined to their homes have been cooking more and buying more garlic to cook with, Christopher
said. His company, which typically sells 500,000 pounds of garlic per week to grocers, restaurants and industrial buyers, watched demand skyrocket after the stay-home orders were imposed — first to 600,000 pounds per week, then to 700,000, then to 800,000, he said. Demand from restaurants has plummeted, but demand from grocers has exploded, he said.
“It has been quite a wild ride,” Christopher said. “There was a huge run on grocery stores all over the nation. Demand for California garlic, really for all garlic, is still surging.”
At Lunardi’s, an upscale grocery store in San Jose with seven other Bay Area locations, staff members and management saw a run on garlic soon after shelter-inplace orders went into effect in March, assistant manager Casey Tauscher said.
“It was selling out really fast,” Tauscher said. “It was odd to us. We were like, ‘Whoa, where’s all the garlic going?’ ”
But the store was out of fresh garlic for only a day,
Tauscher said.
Larger retailers are more likely to have the bulb in stock amid the shortage, Christopher said.
“A lot of mom-and-pops may be getting shut out right now,” he said.
One of the region’s smaller grocers, Staff of Life in Santa Cruz, has put up notices that it doesn’t expect to have fresh garlic bulbs in stock until the end of June or probably July.
“When the pandemic hit, everybody bought garlic because they all of the sudden had to cook at home, so we ran out initially and had to wait like four days until we could get another delivery of it, then that sold out, then it’s like, ‘OK, now we’re on a full California shortage of garlic,’ ” Staff of Life lead cashier Shalee Jacobsen said.
Six to 10 people per shift ask her about buying garlic, she said.
Staff of Life’s garlic problem derives in part from its policy of buying from close-to-home producers.
“We’ll only get California garlic,” Jacobsen said.
Stockpiles of Gilroy-grown garlic from last year’s harvest were low before the coronavirus outbreak after spring rains last May stained bulbs and made them unacceptable to retailers, Christopher said, adding that his company had to dump more than 10 million pounds of the blemished produce.
Close to half of the garlic consumed in California is grown in-state by three major farms including Christopher Ranch, he said.
Some consumers have ramped up their garlic purchases out of a belief that the pungent cloves have properties that could be helpful against the virus, Christopher said. Google Trends indicates searches for “health benefits of garlic” spiked as shelter orders came into effect, with the Bay Area showing the highest interest.
But UC Berkeley epidemiologist Arthur Reingold threw cold water on the notion that the bulb may offer protection from COVID-19.
“I eat a lot of garlic myself, but I don’t expect it to protect me from infectious disease,” Reingold said.
Christopher Ranch had for five years been moving toward selling only U.S.grown garlic and last year succeeded in meeting buyers’ demands entirely from California, Christopher said. But the shortage has meant the company has had to import garlic from Spain, Argentina and Mexico, he said.
“It’s a worldwide pandemic, so everyone is purchasing from those countries and from California, which has intensified the shortage,” Christopher said.
While larger grocers and chains typically have relatively long-term, fixedprice contracts with garlic suppliers and have not had to pay more for wholesale garlic and charge higher prices to customers, smaller stores may be paying more to stock it, Christopher said.
Bags of five bulbs that used to sell for $2 now cost a dollar more at AC Grocery, a small shop near downtown San Jose, because the wholesale price went up after the pandemic hit, owner Sammy Sharif said.
“Our cost is over $2, so we sell it for $3,” Sharif said.
Some grocers have not seen surging demand for garlic or noticed a shortage.
“It’s not like there’s any panic buying,” said Cal Wong, manager at Zanotto’s, in San Jose’s Rose Garden neighborhood. “There hasn’t been a run on it like yeast or flour or toilet tissue.”
For some consumers, the only evidence of the garlic deficit may be that available bulbs are larger or smaller than shoppers are used to seeing, Christopher said. And grocers out of fresh bulbs may have it in jars or peeled in packages, he said.
The shortage is expected to end soon, as the nearterm garlic forecast calls for abundance, Christopher said.
“There is light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “Our harvest is going to start in three weeks. We expect to have a very good crop.”