It required the executive branch to loosen some restrictions, which came in March, but still resulted in “spot shortages” on a retail level. Rerouting food already packaged for the food service industry could not be done with a simple rerouting of trucks, Wilkins said. “Without the structure in place to package that food and the inability for us to be nimble to redirect that to the supermarkets, it’s been a frustrating challenge when you’re a farmer that has to destroy a crop because there’s no market for it,” he said during the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce webinar.
Porter said that companies are “paying out of pocket” for PCR full diagnostic testing. The industry is testing staff through a partnership with the state and hospitals. Poultry plants are stepping up screening and sanitation. Workers are starting to come back, although Porter says it’s not at 100% operations. With fewer staff to process chicken, farms in Delaware and other states were forced to “depopulate” 2 million birds in April. The next was workers staying home, either to take care of sick family members or out of fear. Purdue and Mountaire Farms and Allen Harim LLC are among the state’s top manufacturers and employed 12,380 people combined prior to the pandemic, according to the Delaware Business Times Book of Lists.īut when restaurants, conference centers and schools shut down, it dried up 50% of the customers for chicken across the country, Porter said in a webinar with the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce. John Carney declared a COVID-19 hotspot in late April - produces around 263,000 chickens per week according to the National Chicken Council. Like every business, the $3.5 billion poultry industry in Delaware and the Eastern Shore was hit by the coronavirus. “The marketplace shifted overnight and the big question is how long will the shift be made? It’s short term versus long term, and the support system created for supply was made with these long-term decisions in mind,” she said. But when it comes to what the marketplace will look like in the future, Porter doesn’t “have a crystal ball.” “There’s still more unknowns than knowns at this point for the future, but we’re starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel,” said Holly Porter, executive director of trade association Delmarva Poultry Industry Inc.ĭemand is there, with chicken flying off the shelves in grocery stores. Sussex County’s chicken processing plants and farms are repairing links in the food supply chain, but it’s still difficult to tell what the future holds beyond Delaware’s first steps forward.