Thanksgiving tables may be a little bit sparse this year, as a result of widespread food shortages expected to make everything from turkey to canned cranberry sauce scarce this fall.
“Sourcing product was difficult last year during the pandemic, and it is equally difficult now,” Stew Leonard Jr., CEO of the grocery chain Stew Leonard’s, told TODAY in an email this week. “However, we are experiencing a supply shortage of fresh products, such as turkeys for Thanksgiving, fresh fish, and center-cut steaks such as rib-eye and porterhouse.”
Numerous factors are combining to create a shortage just in time for the holiday shopping season to begin. For starters, the labor shortage has reverberated throughout virtually every supply chain. Not only has this made it more difficult to grow, raise, and cultivate food, but it has also meant that sometimes food sits on ships or train cars waiting to be unloaded by absent workers.
“We’re having difficulty obtaining New Zealand lamb because there are ships awaiting unloading at the dock due to a lack of dock workers,” Leonard explained.
And it is unlikely to improve. Farms in desperate need of farmhands compete for workers with the service sector, which requires less strenuous physical labor and frequently pays more.
“Finding people willing to work on farms is even more difficult now than it was previously. We are perpetually short of personnel “According to Jayne Sebright, executive director of the Center for Dairy Excellence, a farmers’ advocacy group based in Pennsylvania, the Associated Press reported in July.
This means that processing plants will be unable to produce as many chickens, turkeys, and other meats as previously—and that you will see fewer of them in the supermarket. You may even notice that pet food is more difficult to obtain, as manufacturers rely on meat byproducts. (Here’s what you need to know about current meat shortages.)
There is also the issue of aluminum scarcity. All the stockpiling of canned goods at the start of the pandemic resulted in shortages of the metal, which has increased in price by 40% year to date and by 9% this month alone, according to Jayson L. Lusk, head of Purdue University’s department of agricultural economics. As a result, you shouldn’t be surprised if supermarket shelves aren’t brimming with canned goods.
And it appears as though Lunchables will continue to be the school lunchroom’s unicorn. Apart from demand, it is unclear why the beloved children’s meals have vanished from shelves, but they remain relatively scarce.
All of this is not cause for alarm, as the shortages do not appear to be as widespread as they were at the start of 2020 and can usually be avoided with some advance planning — such as ordering a frozen turkey ahead of time this November.
“This is not like the early stages of the pandemic, when people cleared shelves to stockpile and panicked,” Katie Denis, vice president of research for the Consumer Brands Association, told Taste of Home.