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Blog post
Who L'eggo My Eggo?
Posted Feb 20, 2010 by Asher Miller
This is old news, but new news to me: Eggo Waffles Facing Shortage Until Mid-2010.
My brother and his family are in town for the weekend and we were talking last night about their breakfast plans. Eggo waffles were a staple of their sons' breakfasts until the shortage forced them, like millions of other American households, to look for alternatives. (Apparently, Eggos had 73% of the waffle market.)
What's interesting to me in all of this is not humanity's great loss of Eggos, which I think taste like sugar sprinkled, waterlogged cardboard. It's the cause of the shortage--emblematic of the intersection of globalized, ultra-efficient supply chains with health epidemics and climate change.
First came closure of one of Kellogg Co.'s main plants in Atlanta due to bacteria contamination.
The Atlanta facility was closed during much of September and October to sanitize the plant after inspectors found Listeria monocytogenes --bacteria that can cause serious infection -- in a sample of Eggos, according to the Georgia Department of Agriculture...
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers Listeria harmless for most people but it can be particularly dangerous for pregnant women, newborns and people with weakened immune systems.
Next came record-setting floods in the southeast, caused by eight straight days of heavy rains in late September 2009, which flooded the area around that same plant. These rains killed ten people and caused an estimated $500M-$1B worth of damage.
Tragic and worrisome as plant contamination and killer storms may be, you could rightly think there was nothing exceptional here. That's true. And that's precisely the point.
We've built highly efficient, global supply chains that are almost miraculous in their ability to deliver things like hundreds of millions of frozen waffles to locations throughout the world each year. But they are also incredibly brittle and susceptible to breaks in the chain. Two events impacting a Kellogg plant and no more Eggos for six months. Snap. Just like that. With the shocks of peak oil and other resource limitations, along with climate changes and economic contraction, it's likely that we'll be needing to l'eggo of a lot more than just our Eggos in the coming days.
photo credit: AP Photo/The Atlanta Journal & Constitution, Curtis Compton
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Reader Comments
3 comments
People don't realize how vunerable our supply chain is
From: Stephen, Mar 3, 2010 02:09 AM
This is not the first time our supply chain has had shortages. A couple of years ago, rice was rationed in some areas. The whole Menu Foods case recalled a lot of brands of pet food.
Eggos
From: Linda, Feb 26, 2010 09:54 AM
The point is not that one might necessarily want to buy this one particular product - and God knows there are plenty of reasons not to do so. The point is the fragile supply chain. Our distribution system is one of the wonders of the world but it's also our Achilles Heel. Buy local, build up the local supply chain in any way you can. It may be all you have at some point!
Eggos
From: Ellen, Feb 26, 2010 07:46 AM
Why on earth would you buy Eggo's in the first place? There are many breakfast foods that can be easily made in the home from natural ingredients. I think ALL the companies making crap like Eggos should shut down! Forever! Bet they have GMOs in them too.