9 ms·

The scarcity of flour, especially bread flour piques my curiosity. I haven't heard about anyone eating vastly more bread than before the quarantine. It's just t

by joncp 6y ago

The scarcity of flour, especially bread flour piques my curiosity. I haven't heard about anyone eating vastly more bread than before the quarantine. It's just that everyone is making it at home instead of buying it with meals at restaurants. One would expect the flour not being shipped to the restaurants would be redirected into the retail supply chain but that doesn't appear to be the case. The only explanations I can see are: 1) People are still panic-buying flour even after they've settled down about toilet paper, 2) everyone is secretly gorging themselves on bread, 3) the supply has dried up, or 4) there's some vast and growing stockpile of unsold bread flour in the wholesale supply chain. None of these explanations ring true to me, so where's the flour going?

renewiltord 6y ago
I imagine it's folks like me who are baking now for no good reason but to pass the time. I previously didn't eat any bread. Now I'm getting fat.
- dorchadas 6y ago
  I concur. I've made three loaves of bread and two pies during all this, and will likely make another loaf this week. Just because I want something to do and wanted to learn how to bake more. I had to get yeast shipped to me from a friend out of state though, as it was already gone here.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    One trick that worked for me was to look for fresh yeast. Everyone thinks of the packets of dry yeast, but forget that in the refrigerated section there will be some fresh yeast. I was able to find that long after all the dry packets were gone. Also, try making sourdough. Have to make the starter first, but after that you're set. Or get yeast from other sources, like dried fruit and such. Yeast is everywhere!
MattGaiser 6y ago
Everyone is buying a mega bag thinking that they will now suddenly do a lot of baking. My mother did this. My grandmother did this. Many of my 23 year old friends did this. They end up baking one loaf and then just forgetting about it in the pantry, but they bought a 20 lb bag because of how much they expected to bake.
- SECProto 6y ago
  > Everyone is buying a mega bag thinking that they will now suddenly do a lot of baking I normally go through a 5kg bag of flour every month or two, just baking some breads and cakes occasionally. So far, I've gone through almost 20kg of flour in 6 weeks. And I know many others who are baking much more than usual That said, mine is mostly a couple loaves of bread every 3 days substituting a couple bread products from the grocery store every 2 or 3 days. So not causing extra demand for the ingredient, just a different format (i get my flour by the 5 to 10kg bag, the grocery store that normally does my baking likely gets theirs in ...slightly larger volumes)
- bluedino 6y ago
  So where are all the 2lb bags then?
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    When the cheaper 20lb bags sell out, people buy the 2lb bags. My guess is that more production is for the 20lb bags, and the 2lb bags usually sat on the shelf longer.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - ascorbic 6y ago
    Usually domestic sales in small bags are a tiny fraction of the amount sold in large bags to commercial users. When consumption switched to home use then those small bags sold out quickly. The small bags are still there in the supply chain, it's just that the demand has gone through the roof so it's hard to find them.
tyleregeto 6y ago
Interesting article about this, one of Canada's biggest flour suppliers has not run out of flour, but rather bags to put it in. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/robin-hood-flour-baking-yellow-bags-1.5541483 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/robin-hood-flour-baking-yel...
dlgeek 6y ago
Consumer flour and commercial/industrial flour are apparently different enough that they can't easily redirect the latter into the former's supply chain.
cyphar 6y ago
The most likely explanation to me is (4) -- but it's because flour (et al) producers are struggling to get their flour into the consumer supply chain. Shipping goods to businesses is quite different to shipping it to consumers -- businesses order in bulk and (to be frank) don't care as much about trivial things like packaging or minor product differentiation. Compare the giant packages of cheese and cured meat at your deli counter to the small individually wrapped packages you get elsewhere. Costco is the exception here (their entire business model is to buy things wholesale, from the business supply chain). Most grocery stores can't stock 12.5kg bags of flour because they don't have enough space on their shelves, not to mention that in their view most consumers would be put off by a lack of choice (even if it means that products are in stock).
pengaru 6y ago
On what planet does anybody pivot to eating home-baked bread without consuming substantially more of it?
- Retric 6y ago
  The comment is about total bread consumption, not home-baked bread consumption. Home bakers and factories are both using the same basic ingredients, so why can’t supply chain’s easily swap? And the simple reality is they use different bags for transport and factories to fill the bags. Thus it’s a bag problem not a flour problem. PS: What’s so interesting about the shutdown is it exposed so much about the supply chain that’s normally hidden. It feels like debugging some third party API has a bug, except on a much larger scale.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    I think the joke is that people that start fresh baking bread at home start eating a lot more of it because it’s delicious.
    - pengaru 6y ago
      Not only is it delicious, your home smells like a bakery with every fresh loaf and who can resist a fresh loaf of bread still warm?
    - mattigames 6y ago
      Specialy given making bread better than the store is very likely, my father used to be a baker and has told me how stores use a yellow coloring to make it look like bread has lots of eggs but it has near none, or how they push yeast to the limit where bread gets the most air inside possible to make it look big, or how they buy the cheapest butter and so on.
      - Scoundreller 6y ago
        In Canada, the reality is that all the butter is the same anyway. All churned to 84% by the dairy board. Centralized production...
phil21 6y ago
I've looked into this, and it seems pretty much down to the retail vs. commercial packaging and the assorted supply chains. Both the packaging materials themselves, as well as the plant capacity to pack a bunch of 5lb bags of flour vs. giant 50 or 100lb bags a baker would pick up. I'm sure FDA labeling requirements/etc. are likely different as well so it's not quite as simple as "find a few trucks worth of burlap bags". One thing I've done is found a local restaurant supply store and had a friend with a business tax ID add me to their account (account is setup to actually charge sales tax so it's all good there). At these places, very little is in shortage - plenty of flour to be had of all types they typically stock. The only shortages I've noticed have been in chicken at the moment, and of course PPE. Everything else seems quite well stocked for the time being. The downside of course is that when you want to buy some chicken thighs, your minimum order qty is 40lbs. But I started a co-op buying group with my friends in the neighborhood and just spend some time splitting things up into usable quantities. It's come in handy for stuff that is hard to come buy in the grocery stores or costco like chocolate chips. Of course, the minimum qty of those is 25lbs so we had to divy quite a few up! The cost savings are absolutely astronomical on a per-unit basis for most staple items. I've also noticed at least at my local costco they have started to get "alternative" sources redirected from the commercial supply chain. Such as 50lb bags of rice in plane white nylon bags with a sticker slapped on it. This seems to support the theory that packaging (both material and labor) is the bottleneck for retail staple goods. Add in all the waste of every 23 year old who has never baked in their life buying 20lbs of flour to go bad in their pantry and things.
- TylerE 6y ago
  I remember reading a similar article about disinfecting wipes - the bottleneck is actually in the plastic containers, not the wipes, and so a few companies have started packaging them in bags like baby wipes.
  - groby_b 6y ago
    Except... they were available in bags pre-Covid, too.
- mcny 6y ago
bigiain 6y ago
Probably because traditional supply chains are awful when they encounter anything except super predictable demand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game I'm guessing the retail supply chain and their wholesalers are a pretty much seperate business and supply chain to the restaurant industry, and a jump in demand for home baking (even if that's probably mostly just going onto household pantry storage) has pushed the traditional supply chain into instability. Pretty much the same story for toilet paper too. It's not like people need to wipe their arses more in isolation, but the retail market and the business/workspace market supply chains are now flailing around looking for a new barely stable ordering/stocking equilibrium.
notyourday 6y ago
> . One would expect the flour not being shipped to the restaurants would be redirected into the retail supply chain but that doesn't appear to be the case. So I have friends that are reasonably known restaurateurs who obviously shut down their restaurants. I was talking to them about the logistics and the issues with the supply chain. It was rather eye opening to me. TL;DR : the problem with the supply chain is that the restaurants pay more for ingredients wholesale than what the public is willing to pay retail. We do not have a product shortages -- we have excessive amount of perishable product that was offloaded at excessive markup to restaurants/cafeterias/schools/etc. I'm in NYC - I can still walk into a regular grocery store in Queens/Brooklyn ( non Whole Foods ) and get chicken quarters from Perdue for $0.59-$0.89/lb. I can get a tomahawk steak for $14.95/lb (the chefs were shocked), a whole salmon (whole) imported from Canada, received today for $6.95/lb. I can get 10 lb onions for $4.95. Leg of lamb (whole) is $4.99/lb Restaurants pay 20-30% more than these prices as the baseline to Baldor or Sysco. I guess that 20-30% slippage does not matter for the restaurant when it is charging 4x-5x of the raw cost per plate.
- chii 6y ago
  i find it hard to believe that restaurants pay more than retail for the same goods.
  - notyourday 6y ago
    You can create an account on most of the restaurant supply services and place pre-paid orders. You would be shocked at the pricing ( there would be a minimum order value as well )
    - smnrchrds 6y ago
      Why do they do it then? Why won't they simply buy retail?
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
madengr 6y ago
Flour isn’t the problem now, it’s yeast. Fortunately my mother in law traded us a few packs for an old iMac, so my daughter can now make pizza dough. Joking aside, we did give her an iMac, but you can’t find yeast anywhere.
- unexpected 6y ago
  if you have enough flour, we got around this problem by making a sourdough starter.
- jefftk 6y ago
  I've been buying instant yeast at a restaurant supply store for $5/lb, decanting into 8oz Mason jars, and selling it to neighbors. Something like 5lb so far.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  I'm about 2 months and a couple of dozen loaves into sourdough starter. Excellent results.
- makeset 6y ago
  She can make those packs go a LONG way, given enough rising time, with superior flavor to boot. E.g. the pizza dough with poolish in Ken Forkish's book "Flour Water Salt Yeast" uses 0.4g dry yeast per 1kg of flour.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Spooky23 6y ago
Retail flour is the issue. You can get a 50 lb bag pretty easily, and honestly if you are going to use more than a few supermarket bags of flour, you could throw half away and still be ahead financially.
jerry1979 6y ago
Businesses may have trouble mixing commercial and consumer lines of flour. Commercial kitchens may get large bags of flour delivered, and the system in place supports those kitchens on a lean inventory basis. Grocery stores may not feel comfortable stocking flour packaged for commercial kitchens. Selling 20 pound white-box-looking flour does not look attractive in grocery stores.
jefftk 6y ago
Commerical 50lb bags of AP or bread flour are still easy to get here in Boston. I organized a group buy to hit the minimum order for a supplier https://www.jefftk.com/p/organizing-a-group-buy-of-flour https://www.jefftk.com/p/organizing-a-group-buy-of-flour
fredophile 6y ago
My guess is that more people are baking at home. If you look at a family of four you could have gone from two working parents with both children in school to one or both parents at home along with both children. They may not have had much time for baking before. Baking is a useful task since it provides food and can occupy the children if you get them involved. A batch of cookies and some bread or buns every week will substantially increase a household's flour use. This is partially offset by less commercial baking. However, commercial bakeries buy huge packages of flour and not the smaller bags available in grocery stores. The supply chain needs time to transition to this change in demand.
brohee 6y ago
Packaging issue I think. Bakers have no trouble finding any, and in my city at least one baker took the opportunity and resold floor in paper bags (at pretty absurd markup).
andrewaylett 6y ago
A UK supermarket has taken to bagging up flour in-store, as a way to bridge the gap between available supply (commercial quantities) and demand (consumer quantities): https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/morrisons-buy-bags-flour-bread-baking-shortage-yeast-lockdown-a9496506.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/morr...
gnopgnip 6y ago
Is it really scarce, and how would you measure that objectively?

by joncp 6y ago

renewiltord 6y ago

I imagine it's folks like me who are baking now for no good reason but to pass the time. I previously didn't eat any bread. Now I'm getting fat.

dorchadas 6y ago
I concur. I've made three loaves of bread and two pies during all this, and will likely make another loaf this week. Just because I want something to do and wanted to learn how to bake more. I had to get yeast shipped to me from a friend out of state though, as it was already gone here.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  One trick that worked for me was to look for fresh yeast. Everyone thinks of the packets of dry yeast, but forget that in the refrigerated section there will be some fresh yeast. I was able to find that long after all the dry packets were gone. Also, try making sourdough. Have to make the starter first, but after that you're set. Or get yeast from other sources, like dried fruit and such. Yeast is everywhere!

MattGaiser 6y ago

Everyone is buying a mega bag thinking that they will now suddenly do a lot of baking. My mother did this. My grandmother did this. Many of my 23 year old friends did this. They end up baking one loaf and then just forgetting about it in the pantry, but they bought a 20 lb bag because of how much they expected to bake.

SECProto 6y ago
> Everyone is buying a mega bag thinking that they will now suddenly do a lot of baking I normally go through a 5kg bag of flour every month or two, just baking some breads and cakes occasionally. So far, I've gone through almost 20kg of flour in 6 weeks. And I know many others who are baking much more than usual That said, mine is mostly a couple loaves of bread every 3 days substituting a couple bread products from the grocery store every 2 or 3 days. So not causing extra demand for the ingredient, just a different format (i get my flour by the 5 to 10kg bag, the grocery store that normally does my baking likely gets theirs in ...slightly larger volumes)
bluedino 6y ago
So where are all the 2lb bags then?
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  When the cheaper 20lb bags sell out, people buy the 2lb bags. My guess is that more production is for the 20lb bags, and the 2lb bags usually sat on the shelf longer.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- ascorbic 6y ago
  Usually domestic sales in small bags are a tiny fraction of the amount sold in large bags to commercial users. When consumption switched to home use then those small bags sold out quickly. The small bags are still there in the supply chain, it's just that the demand has gone through the roof so it's hard to find them.

tyleregeto 6y ago

Interesting article about this, one of Canada's biggest flour suppliers has not run out of flour, but rather bags to put it in. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/robin-hood-flour-baking-yellow-bags-1.5541483 https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/robin-hood-flour-baking-yel...

dlgeek 6y ago

Consumer flour and commercial/industrial flour are apparently different enough that they can't easily redirect the latter into the former's supply chain.

cyphar 6y ago

The most likely explanation to me is (4) -- but it's because flour (et al) producers are struggling to get their flour into the consumer supply chain. Shipping goods to businesses is quite different to shipping it to consumers -- businesses order in bulk and (to be frank) don't care as much about trivial things like packaging or minor product differentiation. Compare the giant packages of cheese and cured meat at your deli counter to the small individually wrapped packages you get elsewhere. Costco is the exception here (their entire business model is to buy things wholesale, from the business supply chain). Most grocery stores can't stock 12.5kg bags of flour because they don't have enough space on their shelves, not to mention that in their view most consumers would be put off by a lack of choice (even if it means that products are in stock).

pengaru 6y ago

On what planet does anybody pivot to eating home-baked bread without consuming substantially more of it?

Retric 6y ago
The comment is about total bread consumption, not home-baked bread consumption. Home bakers and factories are both using the same basic ingredients, so why can’t supply chain’s easily swap? And the simple reality is they use different bags for transport and factories to fill the bags. Thus it’s a bag problem not a flour problem. PS: What’s so interesting about the shutdown is it exposed so much about the supply chain that’s normally hidden. It feels like debugging some third party API has a bug, except on a much larger scale.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  I think the joke is that people that start fresh baking bread at home start eating a lot more of it because it’s delicious.
  - pengaru 6y ago
    Not only is it delicious, your home smells like a bakery with every fresh loaf and who can resist a fresh loaf of bread still warm?
  - mattigames 6y ago
    Specialy given making bread better than the store is very likely, my father used to be a baker and has told me how stores use a yellow coloring to make it look like bread has lots of eggs but it has near none, or how they push yeast to the limit where bread gets the most air inside possible to make it look big, or how they buy the cheapest butter and so on.
    - Scoundreller 6y ago
      In Canada, the reality is that all the butter is the same anyway. All churned to 84% by the dairy board. Centralized production...

phil21 6y ago

I've looked into this, and it seems pretty much down to the retail vs. commercial packaging and the assorted supply chains. Both the packaging materials themselves, as well as the plant capacity to pack a bunch of 5lb bags of flour vs. giant 50 or 100lb bags a baker would pick up. I'm sure FDA labeling requirements/etc. are likely different as well so it's not quite as simple as "find a few trucks worth of burlap bags". One thing I've done is found a local restaurant supply store and had a friend with a business tax ID add me to their account (account is setup to actually charge sales tax so it's all good there). At these places, very little is in shortage - plenty of flour to be had of all types they typically stock. The only shortages I've noticed have been in chicken at the moment, and of course PPE. Everything else seems quite well stocked for the time being. The downside of course is that when you want to buy some chicken thighs, your minimum order qty is 40lbs. But I started a co-op buying group with my friends in the neighborhood and just spend some time splitting things up into usable quantities. It's come in handy for stuff that is hard to come buy in the grocery stores or costco like chocolate chips. Of course, the minimum qty of those is 25lbs so we had to divy quite a few up! The cost savings are absolutely astronomical on a per-unit basis for most staple items. I've also noticed at least at my local costco they have started to get "alternative" sources redirected from the commercial supply chain. Such as 50lb bags of rice in plane white nylon bags with a sticker slapped on it. This seems to support the theory that packaging (both material and labor) is the bottleneck for retail staple goods. Add in all the waste of every 23 year old who has never baked in their life buying 20lbs of flour to go bad in their pantry and things.

TylerE 6y ago
I remember reading a similar article about disinfecting wipes - the bottleneck is actually in the plastic containers, not the wipes, and so a few companies have started packaging them in bags like baby wipes.
- groby_b 6y ago
  Except... they were available in bags pre-Covid, too.
mcny 6y ago

bigiain 6y ago

Probably because traditional supply chains are awful when they encounter anything except super predictable demand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game I'm guessing the retail supply chain and their wholesalers are a pretty much seperate business and supply chain to the restaurant industry, and a jump in demand for home baking (even if that's probably mostly just going onto household pantry storage) has pushed the traditional supply chain into instability. Pretty much the same story for toilet paper too. It's not like people need to wipe their arses more in isolation, but the retail market and the business/workspace market supply chains are now flailing around looking for a new barely stable ordering/stocking equilibrium.

notyourday 6y ago

> . One would expect the flour not being shipped to the restaurants would be redirected into the retail supply chain but that doesn't appear to be the case. So I have friends that are reasonably known restaurateurs who obviously shut down their restaurants. I was talking to them about the logistics and the issues with the supply chain. It was rather eye opening to me. TL;DR : the problem with the supply chain is that the restaurants pay more for ingredients wholesale than what the public is willing to pay retail. We do not have a product shortages -- we have excessive amount of perishable product that was offloaded at excessive markup to restaurants/cafeterias/schools/etc. I'm in NYC - I can still walk into a regular grocery store in Queens/Brooklyn ( non Whole Foods ) and get chicken quarters from Perdue for $0.59-$0.89/lb. I can get a tomahawk steak for $14.95/lb (the chefs were shocked), a whole salmon (whole) imported from Canada, received today for $6.95/lb. I can get 10 lb onions for $4.95. Leg of lamb (whole) is $4.99/lb Restaurants pay 20-30% more than these prices as the baseline to Baldor or Sysco. I guess that 20-30% slippage does not matter for the restaurant when it is charging 4x-5x of the raw cost per plate.

chii 6y ago
i find it hard to believe that restaurants pay more than retail for the same goods.
- notyourday 6y ago
  You can create an account on most of the restaurant supply services and place pre-paid orders. You would be shocked at the pricing ( there would be a minimum order value as well )
  - smnrchrds 6y ago
    Why do they do it then? Why won't they simply buy retail?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]

madengr 6y ago

Flour isn’t the problem now, it’s yeast. Fortunately my mother in law traded us a few packs for an old iMac, so my daughter can now make pizza dough. Joking aside, we did give her an iMac, but you can’t find yeast anywhere.

unexpected 6y ago
if you have enough flour, we got around this problem by making a sourdough starter.
jefftk 6y ago
I've been buying instant yeast at a restaurant supply store for $5/lb, decanting into 8oz Mason jars, and selling it to neighbors. Something like 5lb so far.
dredmorbius 6y ago
I'm about 2 months and a couple of dozen loaves into sourdough starter. Excellent results.
makeset 6y ago
She can make those packs go a LONG way, given enough rising time, with superior flavor to boot. E.g. the pizza dough with poolish in Ken Forkish's book "Flour Water Salt Yeast" uses 0.4g dry yeast per 1kg of flour.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Spooky23 6y ago

Retail flour is the issue. You can get a 50 lb bag pretty easily, and honestly if you are going to use more than a few supermarket bags of flour, you could throw half away and still be ahead financially.

jerry1979 6y ago

Businesses may have trouble mixing commercial and consumer lines of flour. Commercial kitchens may get large bags of flour delivered, and the system in place supports those kitchens on a lean inventory basis. Grocery stores may not feel comfortable stocking flour packaged for commercial kitchens. Selling 20 pound white-box-looking flour does not look attractive in grocery stores.

jefftk 6y ago

Commerical 50lb bags of AP or bread flour are still easy to get here in Boston. I organized a group buy to hit the minimum order for a supplier https://www.jefftk.com/p/organizing-a-group-buy-of-flour https://www.jefftk.com/p/organizing-a-group-buy-of-flour

fredophile 6y ago

My guess is that more people are baking at home. If you look at a family of four you could have gone from two working parents with both children in school to one or both parents at home along with both children. They may not have had much time for baking before. Baking is a useful task since it provides food and can occupy the children if you get them involved. A batch of cookies and some bread or buns every week will substantially increase a household's flour use. This is partially offset by less commercial baking. However, commercial bakeries buy huge packages of flour and not the smaller bags available in grocery stores. The supply chain needs time to transition to this change in demand.

brohee 6y ago

Packaging issue I think. Bakers have no trouble finding any, and in my city at least one baker took the opportunity and resold floor in paper bags (at pretty absurd markup).

andrewaylett 6y ago

A UK supermarket has taken to bagging up flour in-store, as a way to bridge the gap between available supply (commercial quantities) and demand (consumer quantities): https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/morrisons-buy-bags-flour-bread-baking-shortage-yeast-lockdown-a9496506.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/morr...

gnopgnip 6y ago

Is it really scarce, and how would you measure that objectively?