Mayor Sylvester Turner and top Houston supermarket executives on Monday said stores will remain open and continue to restock daily with food and household items, amid a surge in demand driven by the new coronavirus pandemic.
“There is no problem with the food supply chain,” Turner said in a news conference at City Hall. “We are not running out of items for our grocery stores. In fact, there’s no problem even with sanitizers or things of that nature. It’s just that people are purchasing quite a bit, and then they simply have to go and restock.”
Houstonians have experienced long lines and empty shelves at grocery stores and supermarkets the last couple weeks across the Houston area. Turner and supermarket executives said there is no need to stockpile food items or basic goods, because none of the chains’ suppliers anticipate running out.
“Our distribution center here in Houston has teams working around the clock. We have products and supplies arriving daily into all 109 of our Houston stores,” said Joe Kelley, president of Kroger’s Houston division. “The supply chain is strong and adapting to the increase in consumers’ needs. Conditions and quantities will continue to improve on a daily basis at each one of our stores.”
Some stores, including Kroger and H-E-B, have trimmed hours to give staff more time to disinfect and restock shelves. H-E-B has also installed “sneeze guard” shields in checkout areas to separate cashiers and customers.
H-E-B president Scott McClelland said goods from 1,300 trucks poured into H-E-B stores across Texas Sunday, and he echoed Turner’s message that residents do not need to stock up on food.
For now, McClelland said, H-E-B is limiting how many people can shop at once in an attempt to keep customers “a full shopping cart” length away from each other and limit COVID-19’s spread.
H-E-B may eventually offer fewer brands of certain food items, which McClelland said would help the stores continue to meet demand.
“You may not see 40 different kinds of bread or 100 kinds of bread, you may see three or four,” he said. “If you think about a product and how it flows from the manufacturer … you have a big pipe, and there’s only so much that can fit through the pipe. And you look at how do you do it the most efficiently? So you’re making tradeoffs all the time around assortment and efficiency.”
