A COVID-19 outbreak that shut down a Washington state warehouse that helps supply Wrangell IGA and other Southeast grocery stores disrupted shipments this month, but the operation has reopened and shelves and coolers are moving back toward normal.
“We didn’t get any dry groceries for the past two weeks, we only got our dairy and our meat,” Caroline Bangs, with Wrangell IGA, said Monday. “But this week we just got our freight in and just got eight pallets of dry (goods).”
With the distribution center reopened and filling orders, Bangs expects deliveries will pick up. “We haven’t gotten any freeze (frozen groceries) for three weeks now, but they’re going to start filling the orders again hopefully next week,” she said.
“People have been a little uneasy lately, it seems like, about everything,” Bangs said. “Hopefully, this will ease them a little bit.”
City Market has not experienced any major supply issues, said the store’s Sharon Hale. The business uses a different supplier, Albertsons (which also owns Safeway), which she said has not had any warehouse shutdowns recently.
Though there may occasionally be some items absent from the shelves at City Market, that likely is due to the manufacturer and not the supplier, Hale said. “Wholesale, we have no problems.”
The United Natural Food Inc. distribution center in Centralia, Washington, reported 119 COVID-19 cases among its employees and contractors over two weeks, prompting the facility close down for a week, effective Aug. 1, according to news reports.
A Bloomberg news report called United Natural “one of the largest wholesale food distributors in the U.S.” Even after the distribution center reopened, scaled-back deliveries created shortages, the news report said.
The Centralia facility, south of Tacoma, serves 825 grocery stores in the region, plus a large military operation, according to the newspaper in Centralia.
The pandemic and its hit to the workforce has caused disruptions across the nation’s food industry, in production, processing and shipping. Disruptions in the supply chain and a shortage of products, along with a lack of enough delivery trucks and truck drivers, have made it difficult for some stores to maintain inventory.
Some of the shelves at the Petersburg’s Trading Union grocery store, which relies on United Natural, were sparse last week, general manager Barry Morrison told radio station KFSK.
Morrison said he recently ordered more than 700 cases of goods for his shelves, but received just 130 cases as the United Natural Food facility is slowly ramping back into service.
The Centralia distribution center also serves Olerud’s Market, in Haines, where co-owner Doug Olerud told the local radio station Monday that he hoped next week’s barge delivery might be closer to normal.
“It’s been a little chaotic because they missed a week where they weren’t receiving shipments, or shipping out anything,” Olerud told public radio station KHNS. “They were supplying our groceries out of California out of another warehouse, from the same distributor. … We didn’t receive the majority of our groceries this week.”
Olerud said he has been told next week’s barge delivery should be back to normal. “But until we see what lands on the barge at the dock next week, we don’t have a way to confirm that.”
Reader Comments(0)