Thought of the Day - January 4 2022 - The McSupply Chain

Our daughter is the GM of one of the local McDonald's restaurants. She mentioned back in November, when we had the heavy rains and flooding in BC, that McDonald's Canada managed to halt one of the shipments of fries destined for Japan before the container could be loaded onto a waiting cargo ship. Thus, despite the lack of lower mainland road and rail services, the people of Vancouver continued to enjoy fries with their meals.

At the beginning of last week, I saw an article from the BBC and guess what the headline read? McDonald's faces a French fries shortage in Japan. Wow! You don't appreciate how finely tuned the world supply chains are until you see that delivery disruptions to the port of Vancouver mean no fries, from PEI potatoes, for Japan.

The article continues: The firm has said it is experiencing delays of shipments of the potatoes used to make its famous French fries. As a result, it will only sell small portions of its French fries in Japan until 30 December.

Hopefully, fry shipments have now arrived to greet the New Year.

As you know we have talked extensively before about the supply chain disruptions caused by COVID restrictions ( Thought of the Day - November 5 2021 - The Economic Impact of COVID ). Of course, our current wave of Omicron measures are bound to make matters worse for the next couple of months.

Cheers

Cliff