A logistics specialist says virus prevention methods such as plastic shields at store tills and paid sick leave will likely become permanent
The usual buffet dinner was missing from the Manitoba Farm Writers and Broadcasters Association annual meeting, logistics expert Barry Prentice noted.
Buffets and smorgasbords in most places have fallen victim to the pandemic, seen by most restaurants and hotels as too risky for both food safety and legal liability reasons.
Will they return? That’s just one of a thousand lingering questions about the food industry.
Prentice told the gathered farm writers, enjoying waiter-borne desserts, that the pandemic has had significant impacts, from farming to grocery stores. While some impacts will be fleeting, others have brought permanent change.
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“It’s here to stay,” said Prentice about grocery delivery services, which have been discussed and promoted for decades, but have only become a practical reality in most areas since COVID-19 forced millions of people to become homebound.
The big plastic shields that stand between customers and till staff at coffee shops and grocery stores are also likely to last, Prentice thinks, since the pandemic has shown the value of minimizing the number of respiratory infections staff are exposed to, regardless of COVID-19.
Paid sick days for employees are likely to become more common and allowed at more food distribution and processing facilities, places where many employers were only grudgingly offering them before the pandemic.
“They had to come in to work,” said Prentice about people in places like the Toronto area’s Peel Region, where a large proportion of Eastern Canada’s distribution network is based and in which thousands of employees became sick, went to work and infected many others, causing nationwide distribution problems.
The problems brought to food processors by sick workers will also likely accelerate the use of robots and other automation in processing plants, Prentice said.
However, some food system vulnerabilities highlighted by the pandemic are unlikely to change much.
Meat packing is concentrated in only a few hands, with giant plants dominating production. When one of those goes down, entire ranges of meat cuts and products can become unavailable for weeks. Nobody can quickly step in to fill shutdown voids.
While many have called for more smaller, regional meat packers, Prentice doubts many will arise because food-processing regulations, efficiencies of scale and tough economics mean few small players could hope to compete.
Canada’s logistical vulnerabilities were spotlighted by the problems at ports, at border crossings and in the tortuous mountain routes of the railways, but these are not easy to eliminate, Prentice said. Canada is an enormous country, so the infrastructure is enormously stretched out. The railways have made huge investments in capacity, the trucking industry has proven itself to be flexible and able to operate through extreme challenges, but the underlying infrastructure can break at many points.
Prentice said Canadians should be pleased with the overall performance of Canada’s food industry in supplying the nation with food and managing to operate through the most severe crisis in modern history with only temporary disruptions.
“We really thought that was going to be a big dilemma, but it didn’t turn out to be a problem at all.”
For all the port problems, border closures and processing plant shutdowns, food got grown, processed, distributed and delivered to millions of consumers.
“We have a very good network,” said Prentice.
