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McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, fast food outlets are hit one following the other by shortages of fries. This is because of the global supply chains disrupted by the pandemic.
You can be a potato-producing country, pride yourself on growing 60 varieties and run out of fries. At least if we look for them in the fast food chains whose supply logic does not always rhyme with “proximity“. This is what many Kenyans are discovering, angry that they can no longer eat fries at their favorite KFC restaurants due to food shortages, while Kenya’s tuber harvest is bountiful.
« But producing potatoes in quantity does not mean being able to process them as fries», Explains Bertrand Ouillon, director of the French Interprofession of Processed Potatoes. Because to be eligible for the status of industrial fries, the tuber must meet a certain sugar level or even a certain size. We also need factories capable of handling it. And of course having made the choice to buy on site at a price that is perhaps not as competitive as that of purchases made by international groups.
Frozen fries more vulnerable since the pandemic
Most of the potatoes that are marketed as frozen French fries come from essentially two regions of the world and therefore travel long distances. In Europe, Belgium and the Netherlands are the kings of processing and exports, across the Atlantic there are the United States and Canada. China is the third pole, but in view of its needs, it is a net importer. More locally, other industrial activities are gaining momentum, this is particularly the case in Egypt and Algeria.
The problem is therefore not so much the supply of potatoes, which is good, nor its price today, but the whole chain which makes it possible to arrive at the fries, the potato sold in the fresh state being it traded very little or so close to the country where it is produced. And this is what can explain the setbacks of KFC today, like those of McDonald’s at the end of December in Japan where establishments were forced to ration their customers.
More expensive fries next season
The frozen french fries industry suffers from the lack of cardboard packaging, but also from the cost of oils to name just two examples. Once the product is finished, it is the cost of freight and the lack of container that comes into play.
Today this explains the delays, even the shortages, but for the next campaign we must expect more expensive fries, warns our interlocutor, which will integrate the increase in all costs, whether related to the production or disruption of supply chains and which might not be passed on in recent times, the contracts having been concluded several months ago.
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