The Week in Food: July 27 – 31, 2020

Made it through another week! Late update due to videography!

Macro:

  • In a word: Lurid
  • Strong Strengths – Markets continued to rise as did consumer spending and home sales.
  • Nasty Negatives – Deaths from COVID passes 150k, jobless claims of 1.4M, 2nd quarter GDP decline of 33%.

Retail/Consumer:

  • Lack of consumer recycling causing aluminum shortage, messing up beer and drink producers.
  • Fresh Direct going to a same day, ‘micro-fulfillment‘ model, testing it in DC.

Restaurant/ Foodservice

  • Not surprisingly, pizza places are killing it.
  • Starbucks is not, as same stores sales fall 40%.  IF they could speed the throughput at the drive thru…but I think they’d have to get it up to 40 mph to make up for this kind of drop.

Food Supply

  • Bees are really goddamned important.
  • Producers continue to push for indemnity for employee suits during COVID. By naming food production workers as essential and constraining unemployment claims, workers will end up  trapped and have little legal recourse.

Lagniappe

  • Because we all aren’t getting fatter fast enough on our own, Pillsbury has introduced a safe raw cookie dough. 
  • One of the dangers on homemade cookie dough is salmonella. There is a mysterious outbreak of a less common strain (Newport) in 15 states.

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