[joncp]

The scarcity of flour, especially bread flour piques my curiosity. I haven't heard about anyone eating vastly more bread than before the quarantine. It's just that everyone is making it at home instead of buying it with meals at restaurants. One would expect the flour not being shipped to the restaurants would be redirected into the retail supply chain but that doesn't appear to be the case.

The only explanations I can see are: 1) People are still panic-buying flour even after they've settled down about toilet paper, 2) everyone is secretly gorging themselves on bread, 3) the supply has dried up, or 4) there's some vast and growing stockpile of unsold bread flour in the wholesale supply chain. None of these explanations ring true to me, so where's the flour going?

[phil21]

I've looked into this, and it seems pretty much down to the retail vs. commercial packaging and the assorted supply chains. Both the packaging materials themselves, as well as the plant capacity to pack a bunch of 5lb bags of flour vs. giant 50 or 100lb bags a baker would pick up. I'm sure FDA labeling requirements/etc. are likely different as well so it's not quite as simple as "find a few trucks worth of burlap bags".

One thing I've done is found a local restaurant supply store and had a friend with a business tax ID add me to their account (account is setup to actually charge sales tax so it's all good there). At these places, very little is in shortage - plenty of flour to be had of all types they typically stock. The only shortages I've noticed have been in chicken at the moment, and of course PPE. Everything else seems quite well stocked for the time being.

The downside of course is that when you want to buy some chicken thighs, your minimum order qty is 40lbs. But I started a co-op buying group with my friends in the neighborhood and just spend some time splitting things up into usable quantities.

It's come in handy for stuff that is hard to come buy in the grocery stores or costco like chocolate chips. Of course, the minimum qty of those is 25lbs so we had to divy quite a few up! The cost savings are absolutely astronomical on a per-unit basis for most staple items.

I've also noticed at least at my local costco they have started to get "alternative" sources redirected from the commercial supply chain. Such as 50lb bags of rice in plane white nylon bags with a sticker slapped on it. This seems to support the theory that packaging (both material and labor) is the bottleneck for retail staple goods.

Add in all the waste of every 23 year old who has never baked in their life buying 20lbs of flour to go bad in their pantry and things.

[NaOH]

> I've looked into this, and it seems pretty much down to the retail vs. commercial packaging and the assorted supply chains. Both the packaging materials themselves, as well as the plant capacity to pack a bunch of 5lb bags of flour vs. giant 50 or 100lb bags a baker would pick up. I'm sure FDA labeling requirements/etc. are likely different as well so it's not quite as simple as "find a few trucks worth of burlap bags".

Yep. I own a bakery. My big-name ingredient supplier doesn't carry the flour brands commonly seen in supermarkets, and the same is true in reverse. Likewise, the flour I buy doesn't include the labeling seen with retail products, like a nutritional panel. If I want the detailed information a manufacturer offers I request that from my supplier or the manufacturer. As an example, I was looking into a new source for one ingredient recently (malted barley flour), and the sales representative also gave me all the secondary documents (total of 70 pages):

Food Safety Audit Report

Certificate of Conformity

Material Safety Data Sheet

Certificate of Analysis

Kosher Certification

Technical Data Sheet

Corporate Certificate of Liability Insurance

Product Guarantee

Product Specifications Sheet

[enhdless]

How might a regular consumer like me get this ingredient information, if I wanted to find out where my food comes from?

[NaOH]

In the US (and Europe, too, I believe) food manufacturers are increasingly mandated to be able to trace their ingredients back to the original source. Each handler along the way is expected to do this, so theoretically there's a paper trail from the beginning to the end on a store shelf.

If there are particular foods for which you'd like this information, I would check company websites and then reach out to producers if that isn't getting the information you want. I can't say how forthcoming companies are with this documentation. Keep in mind trade secrets could be involved that might be violated just by providing that level of specificity.

[Scoundreller]

> trade secrets

I got this excuse when I wanted to know if “natural ingredients” included cinnamon in the cinnamon spread I bought once.

After stating that I had a cinnamon allergy, they confirmed to me that it did.

[s5300]

Inquire with the manufacturer listed on the packaging? There's always some sort of chain to information on packaging, though unless there are laws in place against this, I think we're moving closer to that starting with a qr code than a company name and phone number/address...

[projektfu]

Calling/writing to customer service is usually a good start. A lot of this information they are required to have even if they don't need to write it on the label.

[mcny]

> Add in all the waste of every 23 year old who has never baked in their life buying 20lbs of flour to go bad in their pantry and things.

How quickly does processed flour go bad? I’d imagine as long as you store in a dry, air-tight box, it should be ok?

[aaronblohowiak]

White flour lasts a long time. Whole wheat goes rancid faster. Just like white vs brown rice.

[steerablesafe]

> white flour lasts a long time.

Unless you have moths or bread beetles.

[AnimalMuppet]

How many 23-year-olds know to do that? How many are going to remember, and actually do it?

[groby_b]

Unless they bought a single 20 lbs bag, or they open all four bags, they have 15 lbs stored airtight and dark by default.

Also, I hear kids these days occasionally use the Internets to learn how to do things.

But even if you open them all and let them sit on a counter, you get at least several months out of them unless you get insects in there. And if that happens, trust me, you've learned a life-long lesson.

[TylerE]

I remember reading a similar article about disinfecting wipes - the bottleneck is actually in the plastic containers, not the wipes, and so a few companies have started packaging them in bags like baby wipes.

[groby_b]

Except... they were available in bags pre-Covid, too.

[tyleregeto]

Interesting article about this, one of Canada's biggest flour suppliers has not run out of flour, but rather bags to put it in. https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/robin-hood-flour-baking-yel...

[bigiain]

Probably because traditional supply chains are awful when they encounter anything except super predictable demand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game

I'm guessing the retail supply chain and their wholesalers are a pretty much seperate business and supply chain to the restaurant industry, and a jump in demand for home baking (even if that's probably mostly just going onto household pantry storage) has pushed the traditional supply chain into instability.

Pretty much the same story for toilet paper too. It's not like people need to wipe their arses more in isolation, but the retail market and the business/workspace market supply chains are now flailing around looking for a new barely stable ordering/stocking equilibrium.

[pengaru]

On what planet does anybody pivot to eating home-baked bread without consuming substantially more of it?

[Retric]

The comment is about total bread consumption, not home-baked bread consumption. Home bakers and factories are both using the same basic ingredients, so why can’t supply chain’s easily swap?

And the simple reality is they use different bags for transport and factories to fill the bags. Thus it’s a bag problem not a flour problem.

PS: What’s so interesting about the shutdown is it exposed so much about the supply chain that’s normally hidden. It feels like debugging some third party API has a bug, except on a much larger scale.

[Scoundreller]

I think the joke is that people that start fresh baking bread at home start eating a lot more of it because it’s delicious.

[pengaru]

Not only is it delicious, your home smells like a bakery with every fresh loaf and who can resist a fresh loaf of bread still warm?

[mattigames]

Specialy given making bread better than the store is very likely, my father used to be a baker and has told me how stores use a yellow coloring to make it look like bread has lots of eggs but it has near none, or how they push yeast to the limit where bread gets the most air inside possible to make it look big, or how they buy the cheapest butter and so on.

[throwaway55554]

Also, store bought bread today lasts a lot longer than store bought bread from when I was growing up. I can't imagine the chemical concoction that allows for this...

[Scoundreller]

Probably calcium propionate.

And source control to keep initial mold spore counts low.

[Scoundreller]

In Canada, the reality is that all the butter is the same anyway. All churned to 84% by the dairy board.

Centralized production...

[pwg]

> Home bakers and factories are both using the same basic ingredients, so why can’t supply chain’s easily swap?

Because the commercial bakery wants the flour in a 100 lb bag, but the retail store needs 100 1 lb bags. And the commercial packaging lines can't easily swap to packing their product into 1 lb bags.

[Retric]

Not to single you out, but multiple people made that same basic comment despite that being the point of my post. Was this unclear?

And the simple reality is they use different bags for transport and factories to fill the bags. Thus it’s a bag problem not a flour problem.

I generally aim for clear and casual communication and it seems like I messed up somewhere.

[pengaru]

> The comment is about total bread consumption, not home-baked bread consumption.

If the majority of bread-eaters have pivoted to baking it at home, total bread consumption has very likely increased.

[cbhl]

Restaurants and factories use much bigger (and plainer-looking) bags of flour than end-consumers, so retooling probably requires changes to the "paper bag" supply chain...

[Spooky23]

There’s no “bread” in bread, so the commercial bakeries are always going bankrupt, consolidating and squeezing every penny possible out of the business.

The average American has no access to good bread at retail, with some frozen stuff at a supermarket bakery probably being the best available.

[kortilla]

> The average American has no access to good bread at retail, with some frozen stuff at a supermarket bakery probably being the best available

Huh? It’s very common for larger supermarkets to have their own bakeries (even in small cities) in the US. I get fresh bread at the Safeway in my city...

[spockz]

Bakeries in The Netherlands do quite well actually. Although they also sell patisserie and sometimes (too expensive) baking stuff, the main part is bread.

[Spooky23]

In the US, probably half of bread sales are through Group Bimbo and Flower's Foods. Direct bakery sales are a drop in the bucket.

[bigiain]

If it works, it's delicious and you end up eating heaps more than usual.

If your first two or three attempts a baking bread fail, then you end up becoming one of those people with 85% of a 20lb bag of flour in the cupboard waiting for the weevils to move in...

(The temp calibration on my oven is way out. Doesn't matter too much for roasting chickens or cooking lasagne, but baking is more temperamental than that, and way too easy to fuck up. Luckily I only bought a 1kg bag of flour to fail hard with...)

[klipt]

You can still make crepes or roti on your stovetop, or porridge in your microwave. No need to let the flour go to waste.

[wolco]

Porridge is made from oats where I live. Is it made from wheat flower where you live?

[klipt]

Not commonly, but you can make porridge out of many things, including almost any grain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porridge#Varieties

Wheat flour's talents tend towards baking because of its high gluten content, so in a sense it's "wasted" on porridge. But if your oven isn't working it's less of a waste than literally throwing it away!

[ars]

Porridge from fine flour?

[klipt]

It's certainly possible, see eg Velvet Porridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porridge#Wheat

[CrazyStat]

You can get an oven thermometer for like $3, unless those have also sold out.

[kevingadd]

This only helps much if the calibration is off linearly - in my case not only is the calibration off but the temperature flux up/down is more pronounced than it should be. I still make do, but it's definitely very easy for stuff to come out burnt or undercooked as a result.

[evgen]

Other have suggested ways to check your oven temp control, but one way to mitigate the problem slightly is to add some thermal mass to your oven. Unglazed quarry tile makes a nice baking surface and a double layer of that will prevent big temp oscillations in your oven.

[ars]

> but the temperature flux up/down

Have you checked if your air vents are blocked? Ovens don't have adjustable fires, they are always on/off.

I can't think of any kind of failure that would cause unusually high swings.

[adrianN]

When the temperature sensor in caked with something that provides thermal insulation the resulting lag in temperature feedback would mess with the oven's temperature control.

[Zenbit_UX]

Hate to be the one the point it out, but have you considered you might not be great at baking?

[wolco]

Bread machine is a just compromise for thosw type of folks.

[throwaway55554]

> waiting for the weevils to move in...

Hatch. If you get weevils, they were already there just waiting to hatch.

[renewiltord]

I imagine it's folks like me who are baking now for no good reason but to pass the time. I previously didn't eat any bread. Now I'm getting fat.

[dorchadas]

I concur. I've made three loaves of bread and two pies during all this, and will likely make another loaf this week. Just because I want something to do and wanted to learn how to bake more. I had to get yeast shipped to me from a friend out of state though, as it was already gone here.

[rootusrootus]

One trick that worked for me was to look for fresh yeast. Everyone thinks of the packets of dry yeast, but forget that in the refrigerated section there will be some fresh yeast. I was able to find that long after all the dry packets were gone.

Also, try making sourdough. Have to make the starter first, but after that you're set.

Or get yeast from other sources, like dried fruit and such. Yeast is everywhere!

[madengr]

Flour isn’t the problem now, it’s yeast. Fortunately my mother in law traded us a few packs for an old iMac, so my daughter can now make pizza dough.

Joking aside, we did give her an iMac, but you can’t find yeast anywhere.

[dredmorbius]

I'm about 2 months and a couple of dozen loaves into sourdough starter. Excellent results.

[makeset]

She can make those packs go a LONG way, given enough rising time, with superior flavor to boot. E.g. the pizza dough with poolish in Ken Forkish's book "Flour Water Salt Yeast" uses 0.4g dry yeast per 1kg of flour.

[jefftk]

I've been buying instant yeast at a restaurant supply store for $5/lb, decanting into 8oz Mason jars, and selling it to neighbors. Something like 5lb so far.

[unexpected]

if you have enough flour, we got around this problem by making a sourdough starter.

[fredophile]

My guess is that more people are baking at home.

If you look at a family of four you could have gone from two working parents with both children in school to one or both parents at home along with both children. They may not have had much time for baking before. Baking is a useful task since it provides food and can occupy the children if you get them involved. A batch of cookies and some bread or buns every week will substantially increase a household's flour use.

This is partially offset by less commercial baking. However, commercial bakeries buy huge packages of flour and not the smaller bags available in grocery stores. The supply chain needs time to transition to this change in demand.

[andrewaylett]

A UK supermarket has taken to bagging up flour in-store, as a way to bridge the gap between available supply (commercial quantities) and demand (consumer quantities): https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/morr...

[cyphar]

The most likely explanation to me is (4) -- but it's because flour (et al) producers are struggling to get their flour into the consumer supply chain. Shipping goods to businesses is quite different to shipping it to consumers -- businesses order in bulk and (to be frank) don't care as much about trivial things like packaging or minor product differentiation. Compare the giant packages of cheese and cured meat at your deli counter to the small individually wrapped packages you get elsewhere.

Costco is the exception here (their entire business model is to buy things wholesale, from the business supply chain). Most grocery stores can't stock 12.5kg bags of flour because they don't have enough space on their shelves, not to mention that in their view most consumers would be put off by a lack of choice (even if it means that products are in stock).

[Spooky23]

Retail flour is the issue. You can get a 50 lb bag pretty easily, and honestly if you are going to use more than a few supermarket bags of flour, you could throw half away and still be ahead financially.

[jerry1979]

Businesses may have trouble mixing commercial and consumer lines of flour. Commercial kitchens may get large bags of flour delivered, and the system in place supports those kitchens on a lean inventory basis. Grocery stores may not feel comfortable stocking flour packaged for commercial kitchens. Selling 20 pound white-box-looking flour does not look attractive in grocery stores.

[jefftk]

Commerical 50lb bags of AP or bread flour are still easy to get here in Boston. I organized a group buy to hit the minimum order for a supplier https://www.jefftk.com/p/organizing-a-group-buy-of-flour

[MattGaiser]

Everyone is buying a mega bag thinking that they will now suddenly do a lot of baking. My mother did this. My grandmother did this. Many of my 23 year old friends did this.

They end up baking one loaf and then just forgetting about it in the pantry, but they bought a 20 lb bag because of how much they expected to bake.

[SECProto]

> Everyone is buying a mega bag thinking that they will now suddenly do a lot of baking

I normally go through a 5kg bag of flour every month or two, just baking some breads and cakes occasionally. So far, I've gone through almost 20kg of flour in 6 weeks. And I know many others who are baking much more than usual

That said, mine is mostly a couple loaves of bread every 3 days substituting a couple bread products from the grocery store every 2 or 3 days. So not causing extra demand for the ingredient, just a different format (i get my flour by the 5 to 10kg bag, the grocery store that normally does my baking likely gets theirs in ...slightly larger volumes)

[matthewowen]

I don't think I've ever seen a 20lb bag of flour in a grocery store. That's a really big bag. That's about 4 gallons by volume.

My wife bought a 50lb bag today: our local bakery buys that size for their own purposes. It's a good sized sack.

I do not think there are many people out buying 20lb bags of flour.

[LyndsySimon]

We bought 40lb of flour and 20lb of sugar in early March; it was one of our last “preps” going into all this. We don’t normally go through either in any quantity - my wife and are both usually on keto. We’ve used all the flour (and have bought more), and most of the sugar.

We got both at our local Walmart.

[teruakohatu]

My flour usage has gone way up, but there was a shortage of yeast in my city and when I was eventually able to get some, it was a werid brand and such a large package that had more yeast that I could use in years.

[bluedino]

So where are all the 2lb bags then?

[ascorbic]

Usually domestic sales in small bags are a tiny fraction of the amount sold in large bags to commercial users. When consumption switched to home use then those small bags sold out quickly. The small bags are still there in the supply chain, it's just that the demand has gone through the roof so it's hard to find them.

[Scoundreller]

When the cheaper 20lb bags sell out, people buy the 2lb bags.

My guess is that more production is for the 20lb bags, and the 2lb bags usually sat on the shelf longer.

[brohee]

Packaging issue I think. Bakers have no trouble finding any, and in my city at least one baker took the opportunity and resold floor in paper bags (at pretty absurd markup).

[dlgeek]

Consumer flour and commercial/industrial flour are apparently different enough that they can't easily redirect the latter into the former's supply chain.

[gnopgnip]

Is it really scarce, and how would you measure that objectively?

[notyourday]

> . One would expect the flour not being shipped to the restaurants would be redirected into the retail supply chain but that doesn't appear to be the case.

So I have friends that are reasonably known restaurateurs who obviously shut down their restaurants. I was talking to them about the logistics and the issues with the supply chain. It was rather eye opening to me.

TL;DR : the problem with the supply chain is that the restaurants pay more for ingredients wholesale than what the public is willing to pay retail.

We do not have a product shortages -- we have excessive amount of perishable product that was offloaded at excessive markup to restaurants/cafeterias/schools/etc. I'm in NYC - I can still walk into a regular grocery store in Queens/Brooklyn ( non Whole Foods ) and get chicken quarters from Perdue for $0.59-$0.89/lb. I can get a tomahawk steak for $14.95/lb (the chefs were shocked), a whole salmon (whole) imported from Canada, received today for $6.95/lb. I can get 10 lb onions for $4.95. Leg of lamb (whole) is $4.99/lb

Restaurants pay 20-30% more than these prices as the baseline to Baldor or Sysco. I guess that 20-30% slippage does not matter for the restaurant when it is charging 4x-5x of the raw cost per plate.

[Spooky23]

They pay more to Sysco for trade credit and delivery. When you buy at a restaurant depot type place, prices are similar to a Costco for unfinished cuts.

As for the supply of meat, expect that to change. In upstate NY most cuts of beef are gone and trimmed chicken is either not in stock or sold before noon.

[notyourday]

But that's the thing - a restaurant depot is not suffering from the lack of customers because it is not designed to sell commodity products at a premium.

[chii]

i find it hard to believe that restaurants pay more than retail for the same goods.

[sk5t]

I also find this baffling, restaurants keep a very close eye on ingredient cost.

[notyourday]

You can create an account on most of the restaurant supply services and place pre-paid orders. You would be shocked at the pricing ( there would be a minimum order value as well )

[jefftk]

I've been placing orders with a specialty restaurant supplier here in Boston, and the prices are generally equal or better than retail. Including delivery! As long as we're up for eating the minimum quantity it's a good deal.

[notyourday]

They are comparable to Whole Foods or special store prices which are significantly higher than prices in grocery stores regular people ( read : people who don't spend $100/dinner for two and don't bat an eye ) shop.

[jefftk]

I'm pretty price-conscious, and our household spends ~$140/person/month on groceries (with most meals eaten in the home).

Here are some things I've gotten from https://www.baldorfood.com/ in the past few weeks, including delivery:

* Bread flour at $0.46/lb

* Yeast at $4.96/lb

* Vanilla extract at $2.55/oz

* Cherry tomatoes at $1.42/pt

* Onions at $0.90/lb

* Honeycrisp apples at $1.05/lb

* Baby spinach at $4.38/lb

These are all as good or better than the Market Basket (local cheap grocery store) price, and the quality is higher. There are also many products that are fancier and more expensive than they would be at Market Basket, but I can just not buy those.

[smnrchrds]

Why do they do it then? Why won't they simply buy retail?

[notyourday]

I asked that specific question from a friend of mine.

His answer was:

* we charge $20 for a plate that costs is $4 in ingredients because we are lazy to squeeze it down to $3.50.

* Single sourcing means I don't have to trust ten of my employees with credit cards to run around the city to get stuff.

* Single delivery means I can schedule it better.

[cgpcraig]

Retail packaging is a pain to deal with, take for example salt. You usually buy it in small boxes, about 1-2lbs each, commercial bags are 40-50lbs. So you need to buy 20-30 boxes a week at your local store, open the boxes one by one and empty it all into your restaurant bin. It's really a convenience thing, it's much easier to handle, transport and store a single really big bag. You still buy retail for stuff that makes sense though, maybe you only need like 2lb of lemons a week to make a sauce, in that case you'd go retail.