BUCYRUS — Patrons of restaurants, both corporate chains and the mom-and-pop variety, may have noticed during the past week a shortage of meat products, especially beef.
Stores, including Wendy’s in Galion and Bucyrus, have been monitoring the shortage and taken necessary measures to prolong the availability of various products.
According to management at the Galion Wendy’s, the Galion store is limiting hours of operation by closing at 7 p.m. through this week. Some menu items such as the double stack and triple cheeseburger will not be available to customers, but all other orders will be filled to the best of the staff’s abilities.
Some beef products are available, but the store’s management said everything changes day by day. The store is bound to getting its meat supply through policies established through Wendy’s corporate.
Management from the Bucyrus Wendy’s, which is part of the same ownership group as the Upper Sandusky store and many others, said the store is watching the shortage as updates from Wendy’s corporate come about three times per week. Management said one item, the double stack, has been removed but it will not be returning and was not related to a COVID-19 meat shortage.
While stores like Wendy’s are at the end of the processing chain affected by closed processing plants throughout the country, Crawford County is also home to a starting location of the process.
Hord’s Family Farms raises livestock, including hogs and cattle, that are sent to processing for stores and restaurants.
Hord’s Family Farms President and CEO Pat Hord said while the Bucyrus-based company has been able to stay operational, the meat-producer industry has been hit hard.
He said the Hord’s operation has seen reductions in output, but has not stopped business.
“We’ve had some slow downs but fortunately our processor has been able to stay open, so we’ve been able to continue on the pork side,” Hord said. “On the beef side, it has been delayed some. We sell some steers to Tyson (Foods), and their plant has had some slowdowns.
“Overall, we’re doing fine. There are a lot of challenges, I’m not trying to gloss over it, but we aren’t seeing the actual issues that some of our peers are in the Midwest.”
He said while his farms have not had to euthanize any livestock, he knows multiple producers throughout the Midwest who have resorted to euthanizing animals with production plants closed in states like Iowa, Minnesota and as close as Indiana, which some Ohio farms sell to.
“I know it’s in the news about different pork farmers having to euthanize market animals, and that is real,” he said. “I’ve got people that I know in the Midwest that are really struggling with that because their processing plant has closed.”
Hord said the issue is a processor-by-processor situation and comes down to if the plant each producer supplies could stay open during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He said in the past week, the pork industry was operating at about 60 percent of its regular operating capacity. He said the food and service industry is an extremely interconnected system and one hiccup causes problems across the whole industry.
Opening the economy, along with restaurants, would help the current situation, Hord said, but getting the processing factories currently at standstill operational would have the greatest immediate impact on the meat industry.
He said the industry has had to change some focus on how the product that is available is being consumed. Instead of selling 15-pound boxes of bacon to a restaurant, those customers are now buying 1-pound sealed packages of bacon in a grocery store to cook at home.
“The change in this food system has been really challenging for the whole process,” Hord said. “When you have those disruptions, now all of a sudden you struggle.”
Hord said he appreciates consumers who continue to strive to understand the issues at hand.
“The industry has been like a well-oiled machine, and it’s like a lawnmower where you don’t think about it but when it breaks, you have to say, ‘well now I have to try to fix it,’ and then you learn more about it,” Hord said. “When you see this, you kind of see how our food system works, so I encourage people to understand and see how important it is.”
He also said his team at Hord’s Family Farms has been great throughout the pandemic and he wanted to thank all the employees for their hard work throughout the process and uncertainty of the industry, while properly caring for their animals with the goal of feeding people.
Large processors, such as Tyson, have begun to open facilities as it was announced this week an Iowa location has passed a safety inspection, Tyson announced on its website.
The reopening of such facilities is expected to alleviate the constraints of the meat shortage throughout the country.