Sainsbury’s boss Simon Roberts has warned of availability issues until the end of the year, while Ocado has revealed it has seconded logistics staff to help suppliers to avoid disruptions.
As has been widely reported, a mixture of coronavirus restrictions and ongoing Brexit issues has meant that the UK currently has around 100,000 fewer fully-licensed HGV drivers in circulation than in normal times.
This has led to some availability issues on grocery shelves, as retailers have been forced to prioritise certain products to deal with reduced delivery capacity, both from their own warehouses and from suppliers.
Sainsbury’s boss Simon Roberts warned that supply issues globally could last for the rest of the year, and said the issue was being exacerbated domestically by higher levels of customer demand for groceries to eat at home.
“Getting products to the shelf is absolutely our key priority. If you go into our stores today, what you would find is that we are getting products to store, but not necessarily every product,” he said.
“Some of the areas we’re having challenges driven by increased consumer demand are in soft drinks. Not surprisingly on Saturday [the day of England v Ukraine] we sold around 17 packs of beer a second. So there was a real demand clearly as the Euro intensity built up over the weekend. So I think the high areas of demand are the ones that we’re very focused on so far.”
Ocado boss Tim Steiner said the pureplay grocer’s internal logistics team were in a good place, but its suppliers further up the supply chain had been struggling.
“We are managing very well internally inside our business. So we have our own team and they are capable of doing all the runs that we need to do,” said Steiner. “Some of our suppliers are obviously affected by the shortage, and we are helping some of them out where possible with our own team. So we are absolutely trying to minimize the effects on our end customers.
“We acknowledge that there is a shortage nationally”
“We are just helping out where we can, and trying our best to make sure that we get all the deliveries that we want to our facilities. We acknowledge that there is a shortage, nationally, and obviously hope that something’s done about it. But overall, we’re managing.”
Steiner also said that in response to the shortages, Ocado has been building up its inventory levels as well. The retailer is currently carrying 18 days worth of inventory, as opposed to its usual 16 days in certain categories.
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