A trip to the grocery store looks pretty different this week than it did a month ago.
Many shoppers are wearing gloves or face masks, cashiers work from behind a plexiglass barriers, and in some instances, household staples are nowhere to be found.
Alongside empty toilet paper and paper towel aisles, refrigerators with barren egg shelves are a more frequent sight these days.
A San Jose Whole Foods and a Dublin Safeway were two locations that ran out of eggs this week, among what is surely at least a few more across the Bay Area.
An employee at Whole Foods said the store was re-stocking daily with fewer eggs than normal, but they were being bought up early in the day. With no stockpile, stores run out quickly.
Independent grocery stores Zanotto’s and Berkeley Bowl said they were fully stocked with eggs, though a Zanotto’s store manager declined to name his egg distributor for fear other stores would crowd in on his supply.
Dairy company Clover Sonoma says it has seen a huge increase in demand for its eggs and butter in recent weeks. While restaurant supply decreases have freed up more eggs for consumers, the company still can’t keep up with requests from stores.
“The demand on some of these weeks has been about four times (as much as normal),” Clover vice president of sales and marketing Kristel Corson said. “One week it was 10 times.”
It’s worth pointing out that home-bound kids are preparing to paint Easter Eggs — if they haven’t started already. But grocery stores and producers like Clover planned for that.
“The big issue is that the demand is so much higher than what we typically see in this time of the year, even with Easter next week,” Corson said.
Two San Jose Safeway locations said Friday customers were now being limited to one carton of eggs per purchase while a Whole Foods in Alameda was sold out for the remainder of the day by the afternoon.
Calvin Wong, a store manager at Zanotto’s in San Jose, believes customers began treating eggs the same way they treated toilet paper when the coronavirus first began to spread in the Bay Area.
“My own opinion is that the customers are creating the shortages with overbuying,” Wong said. “It’s kind of getting a little better with our suppliers with groceries.”
Even if a number of stores aren’t experiencing an egg shortage, suppliers are hearing from a long list of others that are eager to get them in stock.
“They’re just calling us and their sales people, clamoring for them,” said Corson. “Within our dairy portfolio, both eggs and butter are in serious demand.”
If the eggs aren’t in grocery stores, where are they?
Keith Cosbey, the COO of Choicelunch, a food-delivery service that serves local schools, said the food service industry relies on a separate supply chain than grocery stores.
“While there’s this run on the grocery world, there’s this oversupply in the food service world,” Cosbey said.
With no schools to service, Choicelunch has pivoted to selling staples bought from food service suppliers directly to consumers as a drive-thru grocery store operating in Danville, Hayward and, beginning Tuesday, San Jose.
Still, Cosbey is dealing with another pressing issue.
“My egg price has gone up 250 percent,” Cosbey said.
Some of that price is passed on to consumers, Cosbey admitted, but if you’re willing to pay a bit more to keep your normal breakfast and baking, Choicelunch can provide that. And local grocers like Zanotto’s and Berkeley Bowl can, too, for grocery chain shoppers who have been missing them.
Production is up, prices are up and suppliers such as Corson see no reason to believe that demand will drop anytime soon. While eggs aren’t as scarce as toilet paper these days, they are one food item that seems to be a bit harder to come by depending on where you shop.
