In February or March, even before schools closed and Governor Brad Little issued the stay-at-home order and phased reopening of businesses across the state, Idahoans started seeing a shortage of standard amenities. In a short amount of time the ability of retail stores to keep items on the shelves reached beyond toilet paper and disinfectants to kitchen staples, most notably flour and sugar.
Like many of us who found ourselves working from home, overseeing our children’s education with a new level of responsibility, facing the uncertainties of a receding global economy, and worrying if the scratchy throat and runny nose was allergies or COVID, a good friend of mine turned to baking as a form of stress relief and escapism. There was only one problem: she couldn’t find flour.
The store shelves had been cleared out and the bags would disappear as quickly as they were replaced by the stockers. Local restaurants, which had been closed due to the pandemic, were selling stored flour to the public at or just above wholesale prices. Bread-baking enthusiasts even resorted to buying flour from the specialty e-commerce website Etsy.
After a flurry of text messages and appeals for help across social media, my friend finally found a 25-pound bag of all-purpose flour and a baking pastime became a daily quest for excellence. And dinner.
“My husband, two toddlers, and I ate a loaf of bread or batch of rolls or pretzels every day, which only fed my obsession for the perfect rise or the ideal crumb or an even and Instagram-worthy crack across the top of the loaf,” she explained. Because her job transitioned her to work from home with only 50% of her workload, she had the time to devote to improving what was previously an occasional hobby. And that seemed to be the trend across the country.
People started baking. A lot. Occasional bakers were baking frequently, monthly bakers were baking weekly, weekly bakers daily. With non-essential travel and shopping discouraged and restaurants closed, baking overtook the old habits of pantry-loading.
As producers, you know there was plenty of wheat despite the layman’s belief that a wheat shortage was to blame for the difficulty in finding flour. So, how has the influx in home baking impacted the wheat industry and demand for flour domestically?
Lee Andersen, Manager of Ririe Grain & Feed Cooperative, Ririe, weighed in, “The big story here, I think, is the shift in demand from food service to retail. As restaurants shuttered, demand shifted to consumer retail products and we didn’t have the supply chain ready to handle the volume of that shift.”
The King Arthur Flour company reported that the demand flour in the home baking sector during the lockdown months of the COVID-19 pandemic was double what the company experiences during the holiday baking months of November and December. But as is true with any product, packaging is the key to the markets where the products are sold or used. Over the past several generations, our society has changed from cooking most of our meals at home to eating out much of the time. Even if we cook at home, many products are marketed in a ready-to-bake or cook form. For any of these products, it was difficult for plants to retool production lines quickly to meet such a drastic and rapid change to meet COVID demand.
Andersen went on to explain, “There’s no shortage of flour, just in the wrong bag size in the wrong supply chain channel.” As a result, both Ririe Coop and Thresher Artisan Wheat have seen demand slow over the past several months. Thresher Artisan Wheat Manager Ken Morgan reflected, “It’s been interesting to learn how important sporting events, conventions, school programs, and cruises are to the wheat industry. People are still eating wheat but not in the way they do/would have at those events. Tailgating is important to wheat demand!”
Even though professional sporting events have returned to stadiums across the country, the stadiums, arenas, and ballparks remain empty. The season-opening game of Major League Baseball saw the World Series-defending champions, the Washington Nationals, face off against the New York Yankees at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. Nationals Park, a 41,313 seat stadium that would have normally had a near-sellout crowd for this game, sat devoid of fans. During the 2,430 games of a typical MLB season, ballparks report selling approximately 20 million hot dogs, which means 20 million hot dog buns, and that doesn’t include the thousands of games of minor league, farm club teams. Add basketball, football, soccer, hockey, NASCAR, and all the cancelled high school and college sporting events to the mix, and the reduction in demand for concessions alone is mind-boggling.
Hard White Wheat was a big part of the school lunch program for whole grain products. When schools throughout the state and all across the country shut down in-person instruction and turned to a virtual format for more than 1/3 of the 2019/2020 school year, the demand in that sector of the market dropped significantly. Now, with many schools opting for delayed opening, hybrid instruction plans, virtual education formats, and many parents opting to homeschool their kids, the future demand of Hard White Wheat is bleak at worst and uncertain at best. Even schools that have announced a return to full capacity, in-person classes face questions of their ability to stay open in the face of virus spread. Every end user has pushed back their deliveries and, therefore, purchases, leaving suppliers with old crop supplies at harvest time that would have normally cleared the market by now.
Besides marketing strategies and packaging, elevators, millers, and food production facilities have had to alter some practices in response to the pandemic. While safe from total shut down as essential businesses, operations have still changed to be compliant with local district health departments guidelines and state and federal regulations, including regular health checks and physical distancing protocols for employees.
The coming months will shed more light on flour supply and demand as things (hopefully) begin to return to pre-pandemic normalcy. Suppliers are catching up with pandemic trends and demands, and have shifted to smaller packages for most products, including flour. There are very few quantity restrictions at grocery stores and fewer and fewer products are unavailable for the quarantine cooks experimenting with or perfecting home baking skills. In the end, there may be a lot of consumers who, in panic-mode, bought far more flour than they can reasonably use. Suppliers, like all of us, are a mixed bag of concern and optimism. Certainly, consumers will eventually return to pre-pandemic practices to some extent — eating meals out or grabbing take-out, and the slump in demand will swing the opposite direction. The only concern is how long it takes that pendulum to reverse. Currently, experts believe that the U.S. domestic food supply chains are secure, and while short-term disruptions may happen, they are not likely to be critical.
