Hey there,
Happy New Year! I find the best returns generally don’t come with long explanations. Plus the reasoning for my hiatus isn’t drastically different from what I shared with you in my last couple roundups. So with that, I’m back! A huge thank you to everyone who reached out to let me know they missed these round ups and to the new subscribers. I’ll be sticking to bi-weekly, and now on Mondays instead of Thursdays.
Welcome back to Before the Cutting Board, your bi-weekly roundup of food + supply chain hot topics to help keep you up to speed on what’s going down with your food.
Before we dig in, I want to share an author Q&A that I did with Chloe Sorvino for Civil Eats on her recent book, Raw Deal. Specifically, I’m hoping you read our exchange about the term “monopsony”. I had never heard that term before reading Chloe’s book, which is why I wanted to make sure we talked about it in that piece. Our food supply chains can often feel convoluted and lack transparency. But, when you’re able to pinpoint where power has been consolidated over time, it then helps answer some of our underlying questions about access and design. Chloe’s overview of monopsony will give you a great grounding for much of the work that I highlight in this week’s roundup - particularly Errol Schweizer’s overview on the egg supply chain and Lisa Held’s Civl Eats report on farm loss in the onion industry.
Let’s dig in.
-This week-
An egg problem or a retail problem?
Most of my close friends know that I really dislike grocery shopping. Ironic, I know. Even when I was younger, I have distinct memories of feeling overwhelmed at the store. I remember being sent to Jewel-Osco with a list of general items like “yogurt” or “bread” and then getting to the aisle to see at least 30 different brands of each item all marked at different price points. It never made sense to me. What’s the difference? How do you choose?
One of the foods that most aptly illustrates the grocery shopping choice conundrum are eggs. Brown, White, Spotted, Cage-Free, Organic, Omega-3 - I wonder if the average person knows why they buy the eggs that they choose to buy. As you probably already know, eggs are at the center of a lot of chaos lately. Cue: “Eggflation”. Across the United States, egg prices spiked up to 60% in December compared to the previous year. Loyal ones may remember that I wrote about the global spread of bird flu last year in April. 9 months later, the outbreak has continued to wreak havoc and egg eaters in the US are now feeling it hit their pockets. Egg prices are so high that people are traveling to Mexico to buy eggs, not knowing that it’s prohibited to bring animal byproducts across the border.
My question throughout all this has been that if avian flu has been present in US poultry farms for a little under a year, then why are we feeling such a big impact now? Here are the articles that helped me piece together an answer:
If you read one piece on eggs, it should be this one from Errol Schweizer for Food Print. Schweizer, a former Whole Foods VP, breaks down how the egg supply chain works stage by stage and the pricing/buying schemes at each stage.
This brief piece from Time, which points out that the largest egg producer saw a 600% increase in profits in the last fiscal quarter.
A CNN Business piece that explains that we’re feeling not just the impact of avian flu, but a confluence of high demand, lower supply, and higher input (production cost) prices.
Lastly, this piece from Vox about why farms tend to cull instead of vaccinate poultry birds - which one might argue that the choice boils down to a wider culture around meat production and consumption. Interestingly, the article points out that most birds don’t die from the virus itself - instead they’re proactively killed (culled) to prevent the virus from spreading.
What else I’m reading:
>From Civil Eats: a report using the vidalia onion industry as an example for how the increasing power of a small number of retail buyers is making it difficult to survive as a mid-size to small farmer in the US - something important to reflect on as the potential Kroger-Albertson’s merger continues to loom.
>The past five months in a new sustainability role have led to a lot of interesting learnings about single-use plastics and materials at high volume, which is why I enjoyed reading this NPR piece on single-use coffee pods. The article lays out how the packaging supply chain can contribute to the overall emissions of a given item.
That’s it for this week. If you enjoyed reading this, please forward to a friend. Even if you didn’t enjoy reading it, still tell your friends - misery loves company :)