Hoarding Pasta in Our Pandemic Pantries

According to xkcd, pasta is surprisingly good for our health. They call their cartoon, Pathogen Resistance:

So, do we have a lot of pasta?

Pandemic Pantries

By rail and truck, discount food retailer Aldi said this week that it was replenishing Germany’s pasta supply. I’m not sure how to imagine the 200 tons of pasta that initially moved from Italy to Germany (“much more” than 250,000 spaghetti packets). But it helps to confirm Nielsen’s statistic that pasta demand soared by 168 percent when comparing the week of March 14 now to a year ago.

Aldi spokespeople said that pasta, like toilet paper and canned goods, was among the products that shoppers were hoarding before the lockdown they expected:

Our Bottom Line: The Pasta Supply Chain

FT recently told us how pasta moves from “farm to fork.” They expressed concern that the supply could be disrupted by the coronavirus.

U.K. pasta begins its life as durum wheat on Canadian farms. From there, it moves in trains to ports where systems that are mostly automated load it onto ships. Next, if all is well at the port, the durum wheat arrives in Italy. In (perhaps) Barilla or De Cecco factories that only recently ran at 75 percent capacity, doubled demand has created a push to optimize production. At this point, border controls could upset pasta transport across Europe to wholesale distributors serving food stores on the Continent. Somewhat similarly, product destined for the U.K. could meet bottlenecks at the Channel before and after crossing on ferries. However, if all goes well, the last step is our supermarkets and then our pandemic pantries.

FT illustrated the pasta supply chain:

My sources and more: The NY Times had up-to-date facts about pasta demand in Germany. Next, the perfect complement was FT’s description of the U.K.’s pasta supply chain.

Please note that I first saw the term “pandemic pantries” in this FT article.