25 ms·

Organizing a Group Buy of Flour

123 points by luu 7y ago

sneak 7y ago
I hope we strengthen and cross link our food supply chains on a local and regional basis like this more in the future. Having most everyone in a city or neighborhood buying from a single chainlink or two isn’t a very resilient system, nor does it make for very efficient markets. Commodities like flour should be available sort of like data on ipfs; the problem is, of course, trust and risk of tampering. Hopefully it won’t be much of an issue and more decentralized supply chains can emerge, making more opportunities for more people. I’d love to be able to be a local cache node in the food supply chain (or web, perhaps), as I imagine others would be.
- gegtik 7y ago
  I think you just invented grocery stores
  - sneak 7y ago
    No. Everyone in my vicinity buys their non-restaurant food from 2-3 grocery stores. I am talking about having the community's food supply be provided by more suppliers, and each other, p2p style. Perhaps a data-driven "farmer's market" style setup. Distributed, not just hub-and-spoke decentralized. We just watched the failure mode of that one.
    - XorNot 7y ago
      No we didn't, we watched a supply chain shock which could've been prevented if we had some common-sense regulation to require supermarkets and grocery stores to enact purchasing limits if their demand curves start behaving anomalously. Distributed systems in software are hard. Th idea it'll somehow be easier when you need to truck tonnes of physical goods around is wishful thinking - the same failure modes still apply.
      - ghaff 7y ago
        Around where I live, supermarkets started imposing limits pretty quickly. It's in their self-interest not to piss off customers who come into buy something and leave empty-handed.
      - sneak 7y ago
        A lot of Americans have a truck or two, and a lot of storage space. I think that these events won’t soon be forgotten, and even if nothing more happens than more frequent group flour buys and a lot more slack in the chain happens (e.g. more people with 10kg of flour in the pantry) we’ll be better off. An uber or craigslist or sia for staple foods would be cool though.
    - admax88q 7y ago
      https://xkcd.com/1831/ https://xkcd.com/1831/
    - vector_spaces 7y ago
      Cutting out the middleman (grocery stores) won't remove the hub and spoke architecture. Particularly when it comes to staple commodities like flour, salt, sugar, etc -- grocery stores by and large buy these items from the same small number of distributors. Grocery and food distribution in general have been consolidating aggressively over the last decade or so. More can definitely be done on this front with regional produce or prepared/processed foods though.
    - roel_v 7y ago
      That's not how any of that works nowadays. How do you deal with agricultural commodities futures in such a model, the 'flip side' of which (crop insurance) is central to businesses in certain commodities? Sure you can say 'that whole system is broken and we need to go back to how it was before the Green Revolution', but that's just ignoring all the other changes we've seen in agriculture since then, and which are all subtly interlinked (like, do we want to go back to a system where double-digit percentages of the population work in agriculture? Can we?)
Finnucane 7y ago
I’ve thought about buying one of those big sacks of flour—I bake bread and other stuff routinely, so I know I’d use it up eventually. I mean, I just got a half-pound of vanilla beans. But storage becomes an issue. I’m already struggling a bit to find places for the extra stocking up.
- ghaff 7y ago
  Even something like flour doesn't really last forever--especially if you don't have ideal storage conditions. Maybe you bake enough though.
  - NikolaeVarius 7y ago
    make lots of hardtack
  - HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
    eh, just look at the weevils as extra protein.
- xur17 7y ago
  My parents always purchased 25lb bags of flour from a local food distributor, and stored it in a 5 or 10lb plastic bucket. They baked a lot growing up, so they went through it quick enough that spoilage wasn't really an issue.
lidHanteyk 7y ago
I recently had no problem buying organic flour from the organic aisle, despite the regular aisle being sold out. People are stupid when they panic.
- epistasis 7y ago
  More likely, the cheaper product sells out first. Three weeks ago, there was no flour of any sort in the store I went to. No corn meal, not grains at all. Except for matzo meal, however, on the end of aisles where seasonal products are held, so I finally made matzo ball soup for the first time! There were also no beans except for a completely ridiculous $8/pound of dried lentil in some sort of super fancy packaging.
- squillesque 7y ago
  This story reaffirms my sense that the recent explanation du jour for scarcity, residential vs commercial supply chains, isn't quite right. This person set out to buy an order of 250 lb of flour and it still vanished before their eyes. My experience with commercial toilet paper has been the same, watching it dry up just like retail. People seem to be stockpiling cheap familiar essentials, plain and simple, wherever they can get it.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Who knows what's going on in the commercial supply chain though. The usual buyers are canceling orders so the upstream distributors--maybe even manufacturers--are also canceling without necessarily anticipating being able to sell direct to consumers. That said... >People seem to be stockpiling cheap familiar essentials, plain and simple, wherever they can get it. I'm sure there's some truth to this. I'm not stocking up on huge quantities of things I don't need. But, for example, a couple weeks ago there happened to be one bag of my favored flour in the store so I grabbed it even though I wasn't necessarily at the point where I would normally buy it. I also have an extra dozen eggs at home. Etc. Multiply that behavior by most people and that's a lot of extra buying from stores and inventory scattered around everyone's houses even though most people aren't doing the two-year supply of beans level of prepping.
  - 7y ago
darkerside 7y ago
Some restaurants, with shrinking demand, are now selling their flour to consumers
- prawn 7y ago
  We bought a 25lb bag from a baking school that had been forced to close.
greedo 7y ago
Our grocery chain has been buying rice and flour in bulk from restaurant supply houses and repackaging them in 1lb bags. Pretty agile if you ask me.
- joezydeco 7y ago
  I've seen my local supermarket doing that with toilet paper recently. They were out for as long as everyone else and now there are these massive blank cardboard crates filled with individually wrapped rolls like you would see in a hotel or office. So some clever buyer got creative with the supply chain which is awesome. Meanwhile, my local Target is still sold out...
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    One of the local stores here in northern NJ has started doing that as well. They are doing the same with facial tissues. Smaller stores are likely more agile in this respect, because they don't need to rely on the items having bar codes and entries in their central inventory system. That's what tends to hamstring large, centralized retailers.
  - fennecfoxen 7y ago
    You can also order toilet paper from the institutional supply chain yourself through a site like McMaster-Carr: https://www.mcmaster.com/toilets/lavatory-paper-products/ https://www.mcmaster.com/toilets/lavatory-paper-products/ 2669K23 is a pack of 20 (I have this sitting in my closet right now) and 2669K24 is a pack of 60. 1-3 week lead times, plan ahead.
    - mm89 7y ago
      Nice, I ordered a pack for myself. Better than adding Tp to Instacart and hoping it magically shows up.
- jjp 7y ago
  Yep also had a local bakery selling flour and oats that they had bagged from the larger delivery they received.
devchix 7y ago
> Webstaurant would ship a pallet of flour, 50 bags of 50lbs each, for $1,081 or $0.43/lb. > Unfortunately, between placing the order and them shipping it they ran out of stock Insanity! I'm heartened that people are still baking at home though. For comparison, retail King Arthur All-Purpose flour goes for about $3.69 for 5lbs, or $0.73/lb, so at $0.56/lb Sir Galahad flour is still a bargain. Whole wheat flour has bran and germ and the oil they contain make it harder to store than white flour, so I wouldn't buy a lot of it. Flour is for more than just bread. Top of my head: tart shell, pizza dough, tortilla, thickening up sauces, can't make a roux or a bechamel without flour, fresh pasta, cookies, muffins, cakes.
- droopyEyelids 7y ago
  waffles are the perfect comfort food during these times- 2c flour, 1.75c milk, 1/2c melted butter or oil, big pinch of salt, 4tsp baking powder, 2 eggs. Throw in some vanilla or other flavor concentrate if you'd like! A quick crowd pleasing recipe using all staples
  - frosted-flakes 7y ago
    Waffles are so simple. Obviously, they require a waffle iron, but apart from that I can quickly mix up a bunch of ingredients I always have at hand in a single bowl with a pour spout, using a single fork to stir it, a plastic IKEA cup for measuring ingredients (exactly 1 cup), and a 1tsp measuring spoon. I try to use "standard" dishes whenever possible because they're so much easier to clean (stack neatly in the sink and easily loaded into the dishwasher). Specialised tools like whisks just aggravate me. And so delicious!
    - tw2020041517195 7y ago
      I, too, am annoyed by special purpose tools and gadgets in the kitchen. It's for that reason that I'll point out that whisks are far from special purpose, especially in comparison to a waffle iron.
      - 7y ago
TuringNYC 7y ago
There used to be a startup "Mercado" in the dot com days where consumers could form buyer's groups. It worked well for a while until the downturn.
- Jsharm 7y ago
  I was just thinking why doesn't this exist!
  - OrangeMango 7y ago
    Isn't this what Groupon started out as?
    - TuringNYC 7y ago
      Groupon is retailer lead. These other services were consumer led, like "I want to buy this -- will 50 people join me so we can collectively pay wholesale?"
  - TuringNYC 7y ago
    Sadly, so many things we all wish existed already exist and yet we just dont know about it. It is a big challenge for small tech businesses / websites -- they can offer desperately needed services and yet users only have so much attention budget to learn about all the services out there.
- sf_rob 7y ago
  Massdrop (drop.com) had a similar model, but they seem to be in the process of becoming a more traditional retailer.
driverdan 7y ago
I guess this depends on where you live. I went to the store three days ago (April 12) and the baking aisle was fully stocked, including all the flour.
lokl 7y ago
Any (developing world) group buy experts here? Many years ago, I considered trying to organize fertilizer group buys in sub-Saharan Africa via SMS, where it seemed (to me, as a non-expert in this subject) that many smallholder farmers lacked access to affordable high-quality fertilizer and that group buying might help. I explored this enough to apply for a grant to develop it (and delivery logistics), but that didn't come through and I didn't pursue it further. Has something like this been tried? Is it needed? Seeing this article brought it all back.
- vikoonishmoog 7y ago
  In East Africa, there are at least two operations that I'm aware of that do this among other things - One Acre Fund (https://oneacrefund.org/ https://oneacrefund.org/), and Apollo Agriculture (https://www.apolloagriculture.com/ https://www.apolloagriculture.com/).
  - lokl 7y ago
    Thanks very much!
    - anticsapp 7y ago
      also http://pricepally.com http://pricepally.com
radec 7y ago
Otherwise known as a Food Buying Club. basic idea is you get enough people together to create a wholesale account with a distributor. Get your order and split it up between the members. Hippies and other Frugal people have been doing this forever (in my world forever, I grew up going to them).
- davefp 7y ago
  Niche hobby communities do this all the time. The mechanical keyboard community wouldn't exist without group buys, they rely on them to hit minimum order quantities from producers of custom keycaps, PCBs, and other manufactured items. These are then shipped to proxy vendors around the world who do last-mile shipping to end users. Homebrew clubs also put in wholesale orders for raw materials like yeast, grain, and hops. These are usually more localized given the large volumes involved, and involve a physical meetup where the goods are repackaged and distributed to the buyers. I daresay there are more groups like this (home bakers maybe?) but they're largely invisible outside their own circles.
  - jedimastert 7y ago
    This is kind of the point behind drop.com, no?
    - radec 7y ago
      yeah I think that is the basic premise behind drop.com. Basically just a non-localized version of it.
    - davefp 7y ago
      Precisely. In their case, they're also trying to host the various communities rather than simply being a tool that anyone can use to run a buy.
    - lunias 7y ago
      Drop has been transitioning away from group buys for sometime now. Since their re-branding their strategy appears more reminiscent of private labeling. Most products have Drop / Massdrop in the name now. The most recent two actual (keyboard) group buys that I participated in have been really poorly handled. One is still delayed and has not shipped (order placed 561 days ago). The other shipped broken (to everyone in the drop) after being delayed for months. I had to manually ISP flash a bootloader.
pavelmark 7y ago
Haven't had too many problems by hunting around, using local retailers, and asking at bakeries. Might help? https://helpatmyhome.com/where-to-buy-flour-online/ https://helpatmyhome.com/where-to-buy-flour-online/
- awinder 7y ago
  Thank you for this, I put in an order with lindley like a week and a half ago and they’re swamped. Hoping it pans out but will definitely hedge with one of these others if things go south.
  - dceddia 7y ago
    We put in an order with them a couple weeks ago (Monday 3/30), we didn't hear anything at all for about 2 solid weeks, and then got a shipping notification on Friday 4/10. It was shipped overnight and arrived Saturday 4/11. Hang in there!
MisterBastahrd 7y ago
This isn't really a political point as much as an observation, but... the people in this country who have the worst compensation and benefits are the ones who are involved in the harvesting and preparation of our food. To this point, the supply chain hasn't been too badly affected because poor people need to work to survive and so they'll go to work sick. But now COVID has spread all over the place, and people who are in those fields and slaughterhouses and factories are starting to fall ill. Smithfield just shut down a massive pork processing plant. What happens to our food supply when those people finally say they've had enough? Lack of healthcare, lack of pay, lack of sick days... would YOU willing subject yourself and your family to the possibility that you will catch it and die when your co-worker comes to work with a fever? In my opinion, we haven't even begun to feel the economic shock of this thing, because we've been able to ignore the foundations of our society for so long.
- devchix 7y ago
  Yes, just so. Some days ago I posted an NPR Planet Money article about the effect of COVID-19 on farm workers, who are mostly immigrants, and the replies to my comment was so cavalier I could not engage. "The food will be fine", no thought to the harvesters who would likely fall ill. There is a swatch of disposable workers unseen by people like these. Our local grocery was out of chicken parts for a while but now it's mostly back to normal. I'm surprised there's a run on toilet paper, yeast, and flour, but meat and produce are back on the shelves.
- bruceb 7y ago
  There is not a shortage of people who have very little money and will take risks.
  - kyleee 7y ago
    One of the reasons why it is so unethical to rely so heavily on streams of undocumented immigrants
  - MisterBastahrd 7y ago
    There are plenty of people who have an extra $600 a week to take their chances at home.
anticsapp 7y ago
This exists already in the white hot Lagos startup scene. It is called Pricepally: https://pricepally.com https://pricepally.com
ccoggins 7y ago
This seems a bit expensive. I recently bought a 25lb bag of flour from Sams club and it was 6.50, or about 26 cents a pound. They also had plenty in stock. Costco also has it for a similar price. Last time I bought yeast there it's also cheap - about 5 or 6 bucks for something like 2lbs(which is a ridiculous amount of baking yeast). Baking a lot can make this practically worth the cost of the membership.
- ghaff 7y ago
  You're comparing probably the most expensive mass market flour (King Arthur) with probably about the cheapest (Walmart's). A 2x-3x price differential sounds about right.
  - jefftk 7y ago
    (author) The original flour we were thinking of buying was https://www.webstaurantstore.com/all-purpose-flour-50-lb/104HR.html https://www.webstaurantstore.com/all-purpose-flour-50-lb/104... $12.25/bag (50lb), mildly cheaper than the Sam's Club price above. But then adding in shipping on a truck from PA added another $9.40/bag. In places where people can easily buy individual 25lb bags for $6.50, though, you don't need to organize a group buy!
pheleven 7y ago
Some of my local restaurants are doing this - effectively becoming concierge grocers who will break down bulk quantities for their customers. Call an order in and pick it up in ~24 hours. They have and can get almost anything the grocery stores are out of including TP (in jumbo commercial rolls), flour, eggs, meats, etc.
baybal2 7y ago
It is surprising to me that the West has hit food security issues earlier than Asia. The food supply chain in US is much better than in Europe, and Europe is better than most of Asia. A week ago, I was very scared myself for there being a 21st century famine in Asia, but I never could've imagined how bad panic buying can hit countries even with robust food supply chains.
- samatman 7y ago
  These aren't food security issues, these are supply chain issues. The difference is enormous, and it's far too soon to relax about famine. We'll know if that happened by about 2023.
  - baybal2 7y ago
    A time when people can't eat food IS a food security issue. Do not invent other names for it. The Irish famine has happened when UK was drowning in corn, and had the best harvest in many years. The Bengal famine has happened in times when most regions of India had otherwise at least bearable harvests. The Ukrainian famine has happened in times when the soviet union had bumper harvests, and was exporting megatons of grains, and other foods. The Great Chinese Famine has happened when Mao too has tried the same trick as soviets did, except it failed on him even worse, like ten times as much. Bangladesh 1973 famine has happened when Bangladesh was awash with humanitarian aid. The chronic undernutrition of socially marginalised groups in 1st world countries keeps happening with governments throwing billions of cash on food stamp programs.
    - robocat 7y ago
      > A time when people can't eat food IS a food security issue If no food is available, sure. If other food is available, no way. Are people starving in the US yet due to food unavailability?
      - baybal2 7y ago
        Have you not seen news of people in the US not able to buy any normal food for weeks, and having to subsist on things like potato chips, and instant noodles? And, yeah. Having a double digit of your (American) population being socially marginalised, relying on unreliable food stamp program, and having no alternative to junk food should've also been called a genuine food crisis long ago. Famines do happen even when there is food on the shelves, like in Yemen, early nineties China, or late ussr.
jahn716 7y ago
Based in Paris, France - even prior to the lockdown, bakeries sold baking-related supplies if you knew how to ask (flour, yeast, pre-made dough at various stages, etc.). But now they sell it like a main product; even today when I went to buy some bread at one of my local shops, they had sacks of flour set up in the storefront and showcases.
- adultSwim 7y ago
  I had no idea! TY!
acdw 7y ago
Love this idea! I'm sending out feelers locally to see if anyone is interested (I'm in Louisiana), and so far I've got a little interest. I was wondering if you'd come into any problems other than the animal thing with your experience, or if there's anything else I might need to know. I was wondering how you found people who wanted to participate? And how you organized it. If it was all friends, or if it was people you didn't really know or found online. I don't have a ton of friends who are really into this so I'm kind of casting a wider net.
- jefftk 7y ago
  > come into any problems other than the animal thing I could imagine someone having issues with theft depending on the area, but that's not something I'm worried about here. If you did end up getting a pallet you'd want to make sure that either they could put the pallet where you wanted it or that you had the equipment to move the pallet. > I was wondering how you found people who wanted to participate? I wrote to a few groups: * Facebook: primarily friends in the contra dance community * Work email list * Email to area family * Email to area college friends It ended up being a mix of all these groups. If I wasn't doing it with friends then pickup is harder. I trusted my friends to pay me and to pick up from my porch unattended -- that would be harder with a group put together from, say, reddit
  - acdw 7y ago
    Thanks for the reply! I've poked around on Facebook and Nextdoor; I'm considering emailing work to see who'd be into it as well. Good point about the ~danger of randoms~.
khazhoux 7y ago
Unpopular opinion: maybe so many people don't need to suddenly become bakers who weren't baking before, and then we wouldn't have empty shelves all of the sudden.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Are you under the impression people are throwing the bread away after baking?
  - khazhoux 7y ago
    No, I'm under the impression that people who did perfectly well buying loaves of bread before, and whose family@home bread consumption increases the amount of bread usage only by a moderate relative amount, are now buying loaves and months-worth of flour. The shortage of flour, butter, TP, chips, and everything else is due to individuals' selfishness. There is certainly enough food to account for the extra meals at home, its just now very unevenly distributed.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      This is simply false. The entire grocery supply chain works on a just-in-time model. Demand for stuff like flour, toilet paper, etc. on a chain-level scale is entirely predictable in normal times - Walmart can likely tell you what a given day's sales will be of stuff like toilet paper down to within a couple percent. A sudden, unexpected, and sustained 10-20% increase in purchases of various staples blows a gaping hole in the entire thing. The entire supply chain plans months ahead for Thanksgiving-level demand. We basically all did a Thanksgiving shop without warning.
- ChristianBundy 7y ago
  It's a shame that people are learning new things and experimenting with new hobbies to keep themselves busy during quarantine. All change is bad, but especially personal growth. But really though, a family buying 5 pounds of flour isn't the problem, it's the hoarders loading up shopping carts full of toilet paper and flour that give us empty shelves. I think we'd have enough for everyone if we didn't have greedy hoarders.
tingletech 7y ago
If you are in Oakland, Firebrand -- a bakery on Broadway in uptown -- has flour and yeast some mornings on their square site. You order on square, and come by to pick up. https://firebrand-artisan-breads.square.site https://firebrand-artisan-breads.square.site
irrational 7y ago
My local stores are totally sold out of flour. I had to travel to a different state to pick up my daughter from college. While traveling, I stopped at a Costco for gas. On a whim I went into the store and they actually had some flour available. I purchased about 200 lbs, even though I had to pay sales tax, since I have no idea when flour will again be available in my area. When I got home my wife asked me if they had toilet paper too. Doh!
- soared 7y ago
  Flour goes bad in <8 months. I hope your using a pound a day.
  - irrational 7y ago
    I do go through a lot of it. My hobby is baking. The day after I got home I made 2 2-lb loaves with my mother starter.
  - BenjiWiebe 7y ago
    You might be able to freeze it. My mother stores some lesser used flours in her freezer, i.e. maseca, corn meal, almond flour.
jarjoura 7y ago
Okay, but with all this flour, where is the yeast? I've actually been lucky to find plenty of flour at the local Mexican or Asian markets. Yet, no where I look have I been able to find even a tiny package of yeast. It's out all over the place.

123 points by luu 7y ago

I hope we strengthen and cross link our food supply chains on a local and regional basis like this more in the future. Having most everyone in a city or neighborhood buying from a single chainlink or two isn’t a very resilient system, nor does it make for very efficient markets. Commodities like flour should be available sort of like data on ipfs; the problem is, of course, trust and risk of tampering. Hopefully it won’t be much of an issue and more decentralized supply chains can emerge, making more opportunities for more people. I’d love to be able to be a local cache node in the food supply chain (or web, perhaps), as I imagine others would be.

gegtik 7y ago
I think you just invented grocery stores
- sneak 7y ago
  No. Everyone in my vicinity buys their non-restaurant food from 2-3 grocery stores. I am talking about having the community's food supply be provided by more suppliers, and each other, p2p style. Perhaps a data-driven "farmer's market" style setup. Distributed, not just hub-and-spoke decentralized. We just watched the failure mode of that one.
  - XorNot 7y ago
    No we didn't, we watched a supply chain shock which could've been prevented if we had some common-sense regulation to require supermarkets and grocery stores to enact purchasing limits if their demand curves start behaving anomalously. Distributed systems in software are hard. Th idea it'll somehow be easier when you need to truck tonnes of physical goods around is wishful thinking - the same failure modes still apply.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      Around where I live, supermarkets started imposing limits pretty quickly. It's in their self-interest not to piss off customers who come into buy something and leave empty-handed.
    - sneak 7y ago
      A lot of Americans have a truck or two, and a lot of storage space. I think that these events won’t soon be forgotten, and even if nothing more happens than more frequent group flour buys and a lot more slack in the chain happens (e.g. more people with 10kg of flour in the pantry) we’ll be better off. An uber or craigslist or sia for staple foods would be cool though.
  - admax88q 7y ago
    https://xkcd.com/1831/ https://xkcd.com/1831/
  - vector_spaces 7y ago
    Cutting out the middleman (grocery stores) won't remove the hub and spoke architecture. Particularly when it comes to staple commodities like flour, salt, sugar, etc -- grocery stores by and large buy these items from the same small number of distributors. Grocery and food distribution in general have been consolidating aggressively over the last decade or so. More can definitely be done on this front with regional produce or prepared/processed foods though.
  - roel_v 7y ago
    That's not how any of that works nowadays. How do you deal with agricultural commodities futures in such a model, the 'flip side' of which (crop insurance) is central to businesses in certain commodities? Sure you can say 'that whole system is broken and we need to go back to how it was before the Green Revolution', but that's just ignoring all the other changes we've seen in agriculture since then, and which are all subtly interlinked (like, do we want to go back to a system where double-digit percentages of the population work in agriculture? Can we?)

Finnucane 7y ago

I’ve thought about buying one of those big sacks of flour—I bake bread and other stuff routinely, so I know I’d use it up eventually. I mean, I just got a half-pound of vanilla beans. But storage becomes an issue. I’m already struggling a bit to find places for the extra stocking up.

ghaff 7y ago
Even something like flour doesn't really last forever--especially if you don't have ideal storage conditions. Maybe you bake enough though.
- NikolaeVarius 7y ago
  make lots of hardtack
- HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
  eh, just look at the weevils as extra protein.
xur17 7y ago
My parents always purchased 25lb bags of flour from a local food distributor, and stored it in a 5 or 10lb plastic bucket. They baked a lot growing up, so they went through it quick enough that spoilage wasn't really an issue.

lidHanteyk 7y ago

I recently had no problem buying organic flour from the organic aisle, despite the regular aisle being sold out. People are stupid when they panic.

epistasis 7y ago
More likely, the cheaper product sells out first. Three weeks ago, there was no flour of any sort in the store I went to. No corn meal, not grains at all. Except for matzo meal, however, on the end of aisles where seasonal products are held, so I finally made matzo ball soup for the first time! There were also no beans except for a completely ridiculous $8/pound of dried lentil in some sort of super fancy packaging.
squillesque 7y ago
This story reaffirms my sense that the recent explanation du jour for scarcity, residential vs commercial supply chains, isn't quite right. This person set out to buy an order of 250 lb of flour and it still vanished before their eyes. My experience with commercial toilet paper has been the same, watching it dry up just like retail. People seem to be stockpiling cheap familiar essentials, plain and simple, wherever they can get it.
- ghaff 7y ago
  Who knows what's going on in the commercial supply chain though. The usual buyers are canceling orders so the upstream distributors--maybe even manufacturers--are also canceling without necessarily anticipating being able to sell direct to consumers. That said... >People seem to be stockpiling cheap familiar essentials, plain and simple, wherever they can get it. I'm sure there's some truth to this. I'm not stocking up on huge quantities of things I don't need. But, for example, a couple weeks ago there happened to be one bag of my favored flour in the store so I grabbed it even though I wasn't necessarily at the point where I would normally buy it. I also have an extra dozen eggs at home. Etc. Multiply that behavior by most people and that's a lot of extra buying from stores and inventory scattered around everyone's houses even though most people aren't doing the two-year supply of beans level of prepping.
- 7y ago

darkerside 7y ago

Some restaurants, with shrinking demand, are now selling their flour to consumers

prawn 7y ago
We bought a 25lb bag from a baking school that had been forced to close.

greedo 7y ago

Our grocery chain has been buying rice and flour in bulk from restaurant supply houses and repackaging them in 1lb bags. Pretty agile if you ask me.

joezydeco 7y ago
I've seen my local supermarket doing that with toilet paper recently. They were out for as long as everyone else and now there are these massive blank cardboard crates filled with individually wrapped rolls like you would see in a hotel or office. So some clever buyer got creative with the supply chain which is awesome. Meanwhile, my local Target is still sold out...
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  One of the local stores here in northern NJ has started doing that as well. They are doing the same with facial tissues. Smaller stores are likely more agile in this respect, because they don't need to rely on the items having bar codes and entries in their central inventory system. That's what tends to hamstring large, centralized retailers.
- fennecfoxen 7y ago
  You can also order toilet paper from the institutional supply chain yourself through a site like McMaster-Carr: https://www.mcmaster.com/toilets/lavatory-paper-products/ https://www.mcmaster.com/toilets/lavatory-paper-products/ 2669K23 is a pack of 20 (I have this sitting in my closet right now) and 2669K24 is a pack of 60. 1-3 week lead times, plan ahead.
  - mm89 7y ago
    Nice, I ordered a pack for myself. Better than adding Tp to Instacart and hoping it magically shows up.
jjp 7y ago
Yep also had a local bakery selling flour and oats that they had bagged from the larger delivery they received.

devchix 7y ago

> Webstaurant would ship a pallet of flour, 50 bags of 50lbs each, for $1,081 or $0.43/lb. > Unfortunately, between placing the order and them shipping it they ran out of stock Insanity! I'm heartened that people are still baking at home though. For comparison, retail King Arthur All-Purpose flour goes for about $3.69 for 5lbs, or $0.73/lb, so at $0.56/lb Sir Galahad flour is still a bargain. Whole wheat flour has bran and germ and the oil they contain make it harder to store than white flour, so I wouldn't buy a lot of it. Flour is for more than just bread. Top of my head: tart shell, pizza dough, tortilla, thickening up sauces, can't make a roux or a bechamel without flour, fresh pasta, cookies, muffins, cakes.

droopyEyelids 7y ago
waffles are the perfect comfort food during these times- 2c flour, 1.75c milk, 1/2c melted butter or oil, big pinch of salt, 4tsp baking powder, 2 eggs. Throw in some vanilla or other flavor concentrate if you'd like! A quick crowd pleasing recipe using all staples
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  Waffles are so simple. Obviously, they require a waffle iron, but apart from that I can quickly mix up a bunch of ingredients I always have at hand in a single bowl with a pour spout, using a single fork to stir it, a plastic IKEA cup for measuring ingredients (exactly 1 cup), and a 1tsp measuring spoon. I try to use "standard" dishes whenever possible because they're so much easier to clean (stack neatly in the sink and easily loaded into the dishwasher). Specialised tools like whisks just aggravate me. And so delicious!
  - tw2020041517195 7y ago
    I, too, am annoyed by special purpose tools and gadgets in the kitchen. It's for that reason that I'll point out that whisks are far from special purpose, especially in comparison to a waffle iron.
    - 7y ago

TuringNYC 7y ago

There used to be a startup "Mercado" in the dot com days where consumers could form buyer's groups. It worked well for a while until the downturn.

Jsharm 7y ago
I was just thinking why doesn't this exist!
- OrangeMango 7y ago
  Isn't this what Groupon started out as?
  - TuringNYC 7y ago
    Groupon is retailer lead. These other services were consumer led, like "I want to buy this -- will 50 people join me so we can collectively pay wholesale?"
- TuringNYC 7y ago
  Sadly, so many things we all wish existed already exist and yet we just dont know about it. It is a big challenge for small tech businesses / websites -- they can offer desperately needed services and yet users only have so much attention budget to learn about all the services out there.
sf_rob 7y ago
Massdrop (drop.com) had a similar model, but they seem to be in the process of becoming a more traditional retailer.

driverdan 7y ago

I guess this depends on where you live. I went to the store three days ago (April 12) and the baking aisle was fully stocked, including all the flour.

lokl 7y ago

Any (developing world) group buy experts here? Many years ago, I considered trying to organize fertilizer group buys in sub-Saharan Africa via SMS, where it seemed (to me, as a non-expert in this subject) that many smallholder farmers lacked access to affordable high-quality fertilizer and that group buying might help. I explored this enough to apply for a grant to develop it (and delivery logistics), but that didn't come through and I didn't pursue it further. Has something like this been tried? Is it needed? Seeing this article brought it all back.

vikoonishmoog 7y ago
In East Africa, there are at least two operations that I'm aware of that do this among other things - One Acre Fund (https://oneacrefund.org/ https://oneacrefund.org/), and Apollo Agriculture (https://www.apolloagriculture.com/ https://www.apolloagriculture.com/).
- lokl 7y ago
  Thanks very much!
  - anticsapp 7y ago
    also http://pricepally.com http://pricepally.com

radec 7y ago

Otherwise known as a Food Buying Club. basic idea is you get enough people together to create a wholesale account with a distributor. Get your order and split it up between the members. Hippies and other Frugal people have been doing this forever (in my world forever, I grew up going to them).

davefp 7y ago
Niche hobby communities do this all the time. The mechanical keyboard community wouldn't exist without group buys, they rely on them to hit minimum order quantities from producers of custom keycaps, PCBs, and other manufactured items. These are then shipped to proxy vendors around the world who do last-mile shipping to end users. Homebrew clubs also put in wholesale orders for raw materials like yeast, grain, and hops. These are usually more localized given the large volumes involved, and involve a physical meetup where the goods are repackaged and distributed to the buyers. I daresay there are more groups like this (home bakers maybe?) but they're largely invisible outside their own circles.
- jedimastert 7y ago
  This is kind of the point behind drop.com, no?
  - radec 7y ago
    yeah I think that is the basic premise behind drop.com. Basically just a non-localized version of it.
  - davefp 7y ago
    Precisely. In their case, they're also trying to host the various communities rather than simply being a tool that anyone can use to run a buy.
  - lunias 7y ago
    Drop has been transitioning away from group buys for sometime now. Since their re-branding their strategy appears more reminiscent of private labeling. Most products have Drop / Massdrop in the name now. The most recent two actual (keyboard) group buys that I participated in have been really poorly handled. One is still delayed and has not shipped (order placed 561 days ago). The other shipped broken (to everyone in the drop) after being delayed for months. I had to manually ISP flash a bootloader.

pavelmark 7y ago

Haven't had too many problems by hunting around, using local retailers, and asking at bakeries. Might help? https://helpatmyhome.com/where-to-buy-flour-online/ https://helpatmyhome.com/where-to-buy-flour-online/

awinder 7y ago
Thank you for this, I put in an order with lindley like a week and a half ago and they’re swamped. Hoping it pans out but will definitely hedge with one of these others if things go south.
- dceddia 7y ago
  We put in an order with them a couple weeks ago (Monday 3/30), we didn't hear anything at all for about 2 solid weeks, and then got a shipping notification on Friday 4/10. It was shipped overnight and arrived Saturday 4/11. Hang in there!

MisterBastahrd 7y ago

This isn't really a political point as much as an observation, but... the people in this country who have the worst compensation and benefits are the ones who are involved in the harvesting and preparation of our food. To this point, the supply chain hasn't been too badly affected because poor people need to work to survive and so they'll go to work sick. But now COVID has spread all over the place, and people who are in those fields and slaughterhouses and factories are starting to fall ill. Smithfield just shut down a massive pork processing plant. What happens to our food supply when those people finally say they've had enough? Lack of healthcare, lack of pay, lack of sick days... would YOU willing subject yourself and your family to the possibility that you will catch it and die when your co-worker comes to work with a fever? In my opinion, we haven't even begun to feel the economic shock of this thing, because we've been able to ignore the foundations of our society for so long.

devchix 7y ago
Yes, just so. Some days ago I posted an NPR Planet Money article about the effect of COVID-19 on farm workers, who are mostly immigrants, and the replies to my comment was so cavalier I could not engage. "The food will be fine", no thought to the harvesters who would likely fall ill. There is a swatch of disposable workers unseen by people like these. Our local grocery was out of chicken parts for a while but now it's mostly back to normal. I'm surprised there's a run on toilet paper, yeast, and flour, but meat and produce are back on the shelves.
bruceb 7y ago
There is not a shortage of people who have very little money and will take risks.
- kyleee 7y ago
  One of the reasons why it is so unethical to rely so heavily on streams of undocumented immigrants
- MisterBastahrd 7y ago
  There are plenty of people who have an extra $600 a week to take their chances at home.

anticsapp 7y ago

This exists already in the white hot Lagos startup scene. It is called Pricepally: https://pricepally.com https://pricepally.com

ccoggins 7y ago

This seems a bit expensive. I recently bought a 25lb bag of flour from Sams club and it was 6.50, or about 26 cents a pound. They also had plenty in stock. Costco also has it for a similar price. Last time I bought yeast there it's also cheap - about 5 or 6 bucks for something like 2lbs(which is a ridiculous amount of baking yeast). Baking a lot can make this practically worth the cost of the membership.

ghaff 7y ago
You're comparing probably the most expensive mass market flour (King Arthur) with probably about the cheapest (Walmart's). A 2x-3x price differential sounds about right.
- jefftk 7y ago
  (author) The original flour we were thinking of buying was https://www.webstaurantstore.com/all-purpose-flour-50-lb/104HR.html https://www.webstaurantstore.com/all-purpose-flour-50-lb/104... $12.25/bag (50lb), mildly cheaper than the Sam's Club price above. But then adding in shipping on a truck from PA added another $9.40/bag. In places where people can easily buy individual 25lb bags for $6.50, though, you don't need to organize a group buy!

pheleven 7y ago

Some of my local restaurants are doing this - effectively becoming concierge grocers who will break down bulk quantities for their customers. Call an order in and pick it up in ~24 hours. They have and can get almost anything the grocery stores are out of including TP (in jumbo commercial rolls), flour, eggs, meats, etc.

baybal2 7y ago

It is surprising to me that the West has hit food security issues earlier than Asia. The food supply chain in US is much better than in Europe, and Europe is better than most of Asia. A week ago, I was very scared myself for there being a 21st century famine in Asia, but I never could've imagined how bad panic buying can hit countries even with robust food supply chains.

samatman 7y ago
These aren't food security issues, these are supply chain issues. The difference is enormous, and it's far too soon to relax about famine. We'll know if that happened by about 2023.
- baybal2 7y ago
  A time when people can't eat food IS a food security issue. Do not invent other names for it. The Irish famine has happened when UK was drowning in corn, and had the best harvest in many years. The Bengal famine has happened in times when most regions of India had otherwise at least bearable harvests. The Ukrainian famine has happened in times when the soviet union had bumper harvests, and was exporting megatons of grains, and other foods. The Great Chinese Famine has happened when Mao too has tried the same trick as soviets did, except it failed on him even worse, like ten times as much. Bangladesh 1973 famine has happened when Bangladesh was awash with humanitarian aid. The chronic undernutrition of socially marginalised groups in 1st world countries keeps happening with governments throwing billions of cash on food stamp programs.
  - robocat 7y ago
    > A time when people can't eat food IS a food security issue If no food is available, sure. If other food is available, no way. Are people starving in the US yet due to food unavailability?
    - baybal2 7y ago
      Have you not seen news of people in the US not able to buy any normal food for weeks, and having to subsist on things like potato chips, and instant noodles? And, yeah. Having a double digit of your (American) population being socially marginalised, relying on unreliable food stamp program, and having no alternative to junk food should've also been called a genuine food crisis long ago. Famines do happen even when there is food on the shelves, like in Yemen, early nineties China, or late ussr.

jahn716 7y ago

Based in Paris, France - even prior to the lockdown, bakeries sold baking-related supplies if you knew how to ask (flour, yeast, pre-made dough at various stages, etc.). But now they sell it like a main product; even today when I went to buy some bread at one of my local shops, they had sacks of flour set up in the storefront and showcases.

adultSwim 7y ago
I had no idea! TY!

acdw 7y ago

Love this idea! I'm sending out feelers locally to see if anyone is interested (I'm in Louisiana), and so far I've got a little interest. I was wondering if you'd come into any problems other than the animal thing with your experience, or if there's anything else I might need to know. I was wondering how you found people who wanted to participate? And how you organized it. If it was all friends, or if it was people you didn't really know or found online. I don't have a ton of friends who are really into this so I'm kind of casting a wider net.

jefftk 7y ago
> come into any problems other than the animal thing I could imagine someone having issues with theft depending on the area, but that's not something I'm worried about here. If you did end up getting a pallet you'd want to make sure that either they could put the pallet where you wanted it or that you had the equipment to move the pallet. > I was wondering how you found people who wanted to participate? I wrote to a few groups: * Facebook: primarily friends in the contra dance community * Work email list * Email to area family * Email to area college friends It ended up being a mix of all these groups. If I wasn't doing it with friends then pickup is harder. I trusted my friends to pay me and to pick up from my porch unattended -- that would be harder with a group put together from, say, reddit
- acdw 7y ago
  Thanks for the reply! I've poked around on Facebook and Nextdoor; I'm considering emailing work to see who'd be into it as well. Good point about the ~danger of randoms~.

khazhoux 7y ago

Unpopular opinion: maybe so many people don't need to suddenly become bakers who weren't baking before, and then we wouldn't have empty shelves all of the sudden.

ceejayoz 7y ago
Are you under the impression people are throwing the bread away after baking?
- khazhoux 7y ago
  No, I'm under the impression that people who did perfectly well buying loaves of bread before, and whose family@home bread consumption increases the amount of bread usage only by a moderate relative amount, are now buying loaves and months-worth of flour. The shortage of flour, butter, TP, chips, and everything else is due to individuals' selfishness. There is certainly enough food to account for the extra meals at home, its just now very unevenly distributed.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    This is simply false. The entire grocery supply chain works on a just-in-time model. Demand for stuff like flour, toilet paper, etc. on a chain-level scale is entirely predictable in normal times - Walmart can likely tell you what a given day's sales will be of stuff like toilet paper down to within a couple percent. A sudden, unexpected, and sustained 10-20% increase in purchases of various staples blows a gaping hole in the entire thing. The entire supply chain plans months ahead for Thanksgiving-level demand. We basically all did a Thanksgiving shop without warning.
ChristianBundy 7y ago
It's a shame that people are learning new things and experimenting with new hobbies to keep themselves busy during quarantine. All change is bad, but especially personal growth. But really though, a family buying 5 pounds of flour isn't the problem, it's the hoarders loading up shopping carts full of toilet paper and flour that give us empty shelves. I think we'd have enough for everyone if we didn't have greedy hoarders.

tingletech 7y ago

If you are in Oakland, Firebrand -- a bakery on Broadway in uptown -- has flour and yeast some mornings on their square site. You order on square, and come by to pick up. https://firebrand-artisan-breads.square.site https://firebrand-artisan-breads.square.site

irrational 7y ago

My local stores are totally sold out of flour. I had to travel to a different state to pick up my daughter from college. While traveling, I stopped at a Costco for gas. On a whim I went into the store and they actually had some flour available. I purchased about 200 lbs, even though I had to pay sales tax, since I have no idea when flour will again be available in my area. When I got home my wife asked me if they had toilet paper too. Doh!

soared 7y ago
Flour goes bad in <8 months. I hope your using a pound a day.
- irrational 7y ago
  I do go through a lot of it. My hobby is baking. The day after I got home I made 2 2-lb loaves with my mother starter.
- BenjiWiebe 7y ago
  You might be able to freeze it. My mother stores some lesser used flours in her freezer, i.e. maseca, corn meal, almond flour.

jarjoura 7y ago

Okay, but with all this flour, where is the yeast? I've actually been lucky to find plenty of flour at the local Mexican or Asian markets. Yet, no where I look have I been able to find even a tiny package of yeast. It's out all over the place.