Posts Tagged ‘Supply Chain’

High grocery demand, along with rising freight prices and Omicron-related labor shortages, is causing a new wave of backlogs in processed food and fresh produce industries, resulting in empty supermarket shelves at major stores across the country. Perishable produce growers all throughout the West Coast are paying nearly quadruple pre-pandemic trucking costs to get lettuce and berries to market before they spoil. Shay Myers, CEO of Owyhee Produce, which grows onions, watermelons, and asparagus near the Idaho-Oregon border, said he has been deferring shipping onions to retail wholesalers until freight rates fall. In the last three weeks, Myers said, transportation problems caused by a shortage of truck drivers and recent highway-blocking storms had resulted in a doubling of freight expenses for fruit and vegetable producers, on top of already-high pandemic prices. “We typically will ship, East Coast to West Coast—we used…