By Patrick Adrian
Staff Writer
CLAREMONT — For restaurants and food sellers, the transition from the pandemic has seemed equatable to switching from a drought to flash floods.
Restaurants across the region, including Claremont, are busier than ever, as consumers clamor to resume socialization and their pre-pandemic habits. While restaurants are grateful for the business, the supply-side of the economic engine is struggling to catch up with the demand.
In addition to the staffing shortages, restaurants are also juggling obstacles in their supply-chain: skyrocketing food prices, delivery delays and supply outages ranging from steak and lettuce to silverware and containers.
Meanwhile many customers are showing little understanding or patience toward restaurant staff over wait times for orders to arrive or limited menu items.
Sheree Kochis, manager of Revolution Cantina, says these additional stresses take a toll on her staff.
“It can be tough when you know your servers are going downstairs crying or the kitchen staff is ready to blow their gasket because they can’t keep up,” Kochis said. “Everybody is trying their hardest.”
Restaurant owners across the city have issued statements through social media in hope to get customers to be more understanding and sensitive.
“We ask for some kindness for any service related worker, wherever you go,” said Nicholas Koloski, co-owner of Time Out Americana Grill. “This is not meant to be a sob story [but] just to know we try our best.”
The economics of shortages
In terms of food supplies, restaurants are encountering problems on two fronts. One is the increasing food costs, with prices “skyrocketing” on many items such as meats and seafood.
The second problem is when the food items are not on the delivery truck.
Restaurant suppliers attribute the shortages to the pandemic, according to Kochis. Many food growers and producers depleted their supply during the pandemic and are lagging behind demand to replenish their supply.
Taverne on the Square, an American restaurant, had to close for a couple of days in May after their delivery company missed two shipments of groceries.
Typically when a restaurant does not receive a menu staple, such as steak or lettuce, the restaurant has three options: find another source, make a substitution or pull the item off the menu.
Michael Charest, co-owner of Taverne on the Square, says his restaurant is particular on the quality and source of their ingredients to consider substitutes.
“We sell a high quality steak that we hand-cut ourselves,” Charest said. “Not receiving what you order is tough when you are always making sure to serve the quality of food you want to be known for.”
Kochis is also particular to her restaurant’s steak selection. But the price has doubled over the last several months and sometimes has not been in stock. In cases of an outage, Kochis said she would likely remove steak from the menu than to replace it with a lower-quality substitute or a more expensive source.
But the rising food costs also have restaurants having to consider price increases on their menus.
Last week Michael Hammond, co-owner of Epic food truck, announced they may have to increase their prices after learning their current vendor can no longer serve them.
“We have just been notified we are not big enough an account for them,” Hammond wrote on Facebook. “The small guys are being cut by the big companies.”
Other food businesses, such as Claremont Spice and Dry Goods, have also reported their distributors raising their purchase minimums due to employee shortages increasing the difficulty to fill orders.
Rocky Bellevieu, owner of Rocky’s Taqueria, said he shops for his meat at local groceries. Bellevieu said the issues of cost and product availability exist at the supermarkets as well.
“It’s hard showing up at the store and not knowing that we’ll get exactly what we want,” Bellevieu said. “As far as markups, chicken is up over 100%, beef is up over 75% and pork is up over 65%. We’re definitely feeling it, that’s for sure.”
Bellevieu said he has not changed his prices during the increase.
“I don’t plan to unless I absolutely have to,” Bellevieu said. “At [the current price of] $4 it is still considered a street taco. At $5 it becomes a luxury taco. I want to keep it a street taco.”
Shortages across the local food industriesThe supply-chain issues also impact food businesses outside the restaurant sector, from local farmers to spice retailers.
At Claremont Spice and Dry Goods, a culinary shop that sells spices, cookware and locally sourced foods, the most scarce commodity at present is not food but containers, said owners Ben Nelson and Chiara Tosi-Nelson.
“From what we hear from a lot of our vendors is that glass is hard to come by,” Nelson said.
Much of the world’s glass manufacturing occurs in India and Taiwan where production has been slowed by the novel coronavirus and related operating restrictions, Nelson explained. Additionally much of Taiwan’s glass bottle production is going to China, which is Taiwan’s primary foreign market.
The global glass bottle shortage is hitting local food suppliers like Bees Knees Apiaries in Claremont, a honey vendor, and Sidehill Farms, a jams and jellies maker in Brattleboro, Vermont.
“Sidehill was unable to deliver our jams for two months in a row,” Tosi-Nelson said. “Not because they were out of jam but because they were out of the four ounce jars and couldn’t find them anywhere.”
The honey jars currently on Claremont Spice’s shelves were formally glass mayonnaise jars, which Bees Knees owner Bruce Howard had to acquire from upstate New York, because they were the closest in size to his own, according to Nelson.
“Normally he has this nice honeycomb-ribbed jar that is bigger,” Nelson said. “He’s been begging everyone to bring their jars back.”
Claremont Spice takes back the honey jars for return to Bees Knees though there is no deposit program for the jam jars.
The spice store also struggles to find plastic and glass spice containers, which some customers prefer to the plastic packages.
Tosi-Nelson said likes to have a glass container option because glass is less susceptible to heat, which can compromise the integrity of spices.
Beyond containers, most of Claremont Spice’s supply disruptions has been primarily in their cookware and kitchen supply inventory, which is sold in an attached storeroom.
During the pandemic food industries, along with the state and federal governments, prioritized “keeping the food flowing,” Nelson explained. While that was good in terms of, say, spice production, there was not that same priority to manufacture the equipment to prepare and cook foods. Many of that inventory is still on backorder.
“I am really happy that our main business is not in kitchen supplies,” Tosi-Nelson said.
There can still be spice shortages, the owners said. Fortunately for the Nelsons, a small, independent spice retailer has the ability to be flexible and adaptable to shortages, even in ways that a corporate spice company like McCormick cannot match.
“We have worked to strengthen our ties with more local farmers [for example],” Tosi-Nelson said. “We are drying our own chervil, so we have planted more and more this year. The cilantro now comes from Winter Street Farm [in Claremont] and will also start selling their Russian tarragon, which they are drying as well.”
Additionally, Claremont Spice and Dry Goods can easily switch to a comparable variant of a spice, whether because they create a number of blends where those substitutes are unnoticeable or they can easily update their product labels.
For example, the store’s sole vanilla supplier, who travels to South America to acquire the vanilla, was unable to acquire a travel visa during the pandemic. As a result the Nelsons acquired a Madagascar vanilla through another supplier.
“For us to switch I just need to change the labels [from Mexican vanilla to Madagascar] and the website,” Tosi-Nelson explained. “A multinational company would have just been out of vanilla, because they cannot change the vendor [and labelling] for tons of vanilla, but doing the change in smaller quantities [of product] I can.”
“We don’t have to scratch our heads like McCormick, who has to worry about, say, hundreds of tons of black pepper coming into the county at once,” Nelson said. “We are like 10 pounds every month.”
But the Nelsons say there could be greater supply challenges for spice retailers in the coming year, particularly due to the globalism of spices.
Current events like India’s struggles with the Delta variant, a new and powerful mutation of the coronavirus, and political instability in Nigeria, popular for its West African spice Grains of Paradise, are just two examples of potential disruptors of spice supplies.
Between the loss of human lives in 2020 and 2021 and shifts in the labor market, where some industries are drawing employees with better wage incentives or bonuses, the Nelsons say they anticipate labor issues to remain a trigger in many areas of the economy.
“People [in New Hampshire] were working two to three jobs before [the pandemic] for minimum wage or slightly better,” Nelson said. “Now you have [some companies] offering $15 an hour with benefits to start. And that’s what they are having to do to get people through the door.”
Nelson believes restaurants have an even harder situation because their employee shortages have coincided with high customer volumes.
Last year restaurant owners were struggling just to keep a minimal staff if any on their payroll, Nelson said. Now the restaurants are busy, the owners are busy trying to secure servers and kitchen staff, and most of these hires are young people who plan to leave for college or other ventures when the summer ends.
One restaurant that purchases from Claremont Spice has also had to make capital investments, adding another pizza oven and a new biergarten, just to keep up with the customer demand, according to Nelson.
“It’s a ticking time bomb everyone is creating for themselves,” Nelson said. “It’s what people are having to do to stay afloat.”
On patience and acceptanceTosi-Nelson, an Italian who has lived in New Hampshire since 2017, believes Americans will need to take a page from European culture and learn to be more accepting and patient with limitations and time-delays.
“In Italy, for example, most supermarkets are closed on Sunday afternoons, or you cannot buy alcohol from like 10 p.m. to 10 a.m.,” Tosi-Nelson said. “And that is an accepted everyday inconvenience. It is what it is and you work around it.”
In contrast, Nelson noted a recent example locally when Tremont House of Pizza posted a sign asking customers to be patient with orders due to staffing shortages. Many people, particularly on Facebook, responded by venting frustration and seeking people to blame.
“With customer demands I’m hoping we are going to see a bit more patience,” Nelson added.
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