A new grant will allow Iowa State University researchers to study how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the U.S. food supply chain with the goal of finding short- and long-term solutions to increase resiliency against future disruptions.
Keri Jacobs, associate professor, said that the pandemic led to major disruptions in a number of agricultural industries. “These disruptions were unique because we didn’t experience a shock to the supply of agricultural products—it was largely a shock to our processing capacity through reduced labor,” she said.
Jacobs noted that the lack of labor was especially problematic in agricultural industries, as the processing capacity and the entire system was built based on the known biological processes for products, like eggs, milk, beef, and pork. Furthermore, as the pandemic first spread, restaurants, bars, and schools closed, quickly changing consumers’ food consumption habits and needs, which created further disruptions in the supply chain. “Plants couldn’t make the switch quickly enough to meet the change in demand and had inventory prepared for a market that no longer existed,” Jacobs said.
Consumers staying home en masse also drove down the need for gasoline, and therefore ethanol, which had consequences that fed back into food industries. “Carbon dioxide and distillers grains are by-products in ethanol production and are both important inputs in other supply chains,” Jacobs said. She noted that distillers grains are used to feed livestock, and carbon dioxide is a preservative and key input in packaged liquid products. “When ethanol demand tanked, so did the production of those two by-products. So, in this case, the disruptions seeped into other food processing sectors,” she said.