Dan (the food industry CEO)

Most grocery chains cut their product selection by 30 to 35%.

If you were in that 30 to 35%, you lost your income from that.

If you were selling to food service, you lost that income.

So there's a lot of things like that that have,

that have decimated these small to mid-sized food manufacturing companies, not just in the US, but really worldwide.

So that's really complicating the issue because consumer demand has not dropped for food, right?

It has not.

But now they're pulling from larger companies that have to attempt to ramp up production in the face of severe price increases and severe increases in labor costs as well.

So similar to how COVID shutdowns really destroyed the mom and pop main street type businesses all across the country, that happened in food, too.

So there's just not, you know, Heinz no longer has a competitor, right, in a lot of what they're selling.

And that makes our supply chain weaker because if Heinz has issues with supply, there's no one to fill those gaps.

Anyway, we can move on.

I just want to put a little bit of a finer point on that.

Anyway, so other things is I've talked about some shortages, but one of the things that's happening, too, is grocery chains and distributors and food service as well have all been attempting to order.

25 to 30% above what would be considered baseline for this time of year.

And what they're trying to do is they're trying to get theirs and stockpile a little bit because a lot of these chains have built warehouses to hold greater supplies.

So the ordering pressure on a lot of these companies is only going up.

And a lot of companies quite simply can't meet that supply.

A lot of restaurants, for example, are going to QR code menus.

I don't know if you've seen that in the Pacific Northwest.