Groceries could see meat shortages by end of week amid plant closings

Consumers could start seeing shortages by Friday at supermarket meat counters, expert say.



Beef, chicken and pork could be as scarce as toilet paper soon because so many meat processing plants have been temporarily shut down amid the coronavirus pandemic, industry experts are warning.

"We've just completed our third week of reduced slaughter and production," Dennis Smith, a commodity broker/livestock analyst with Archer Financial Services in Chicago, said. "My guess is that about one week out, perhaps around May 1, shortages will begin developing at retail meat counters."

Overall meat production is down 25 percent, Smith said, "which is a huge decline."

It might be time to save some bacon, since the amount of pork in frozen storage dropped last month by 4 percent, to 621 million pounds, the Department of Agriculture reported last week.

"The cause of the shortage is reduced production due to labor issues at the packing plants," Smith said. "Some plants have closed for deep cleaning and will remain closed until the employee base has recovered from the virus. Others are implementing safety procedures which in effect slows processing speed at the plants."

Case in point: The Smithfield Foods plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota — the state that is now one of the nation's biggest coronavirus hot spots — was closed after two workers died and 783 others tested positive for the virus.

Right now, there is enough meat to feed American appetites. In fact, the 502 million pounds of beef in warehouse freezers was up 2 percent from the previous month while the amount of chicken in storage dropped slightly to about 921 million pounds, according to the Agriculture Department.

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But the pandemic has clogged the pipeline for getting more meat to grocery stores, the experts said.

"There are likely to be (meat) shortages in select parts of the country," Terry Reilly, a senior commodity analyst at Futures International in Chicago.

Reilly noted that last month in Chicago, in the early days of the crisis, there was a run on chicken as fearful consumers emptied the shelves. He said there's no reason to worry just yet about a meat shortage.

"There is a lot of frozen pork and beef sitting in freezers, so people shouldn't panic," Reilly said. "In San Diego, they're trying to figure out where to store all the fish that they would normally be serving the tourists."