In the dozen years since Lucas Papierniak first scouted Bali, Indonesia, for its tuna fishing, the seafood supplier has built a thriving business shipping poke cubes to hundreds of restaurants and sashimi-grade yellowfin to high-end sushi bars in Los Angeles and New York.
But almost immediately after lockdowns were announced last month to slow the spread of the coronavirus, orders for his fish came to a stop. One East Coast customer canceled a purchase of two 45,000-pound containers of poke cubes valued at about half a million dollars.
Business just died, said Papierniak, whose company is based in Hawaii. We had to figure out how to keep paying our fishermen.
The 40-year-old father of four, including a newborn, started scrambling for ways to keep 5,000 fishermen and 350 factory workers on his payroll. His distributor in downtown Los Angeles suggested tapping into the extraordinarily busy grocery industry by supplying tuna steaks. The change in business keeps him open, but each day is a struggle; tuna steaks command a fraction of the price of sashimi.
Even if restaurants were to reopen in the near future, Papierniak estimates it would take three months to restart his supply chain.
This isn’t going to blow over once shelter-in-place is lifted, he said.
The coronavirus pandemic is short-circuiting the intricate network of producers and suppliers like Papierniak needed to power the global food system. It affects everything from caviar to apple juice and from Michelin-grade restaurants to the shopkeeper selling nuts and canned goods in a village in India.
Restaurants, an industry where Americans devote more than half their annual food budget, are out of action. Cargo freight and ports are operating well below normal capacity. And the labor that propels the harvesting, packing and delivery of food can’t return to full force until conditions are safe.
The crisis has upset the palates of consumers in richer countries who are accustomed to eating whatever and whenever they want thanks to synchronized, rapidly moving economic designs that can make all manner of food appear, including out-of-season blueberries from the Southern Hemisphere.
2020, Los Angeles Times