Worker absenteeism — not trucker vaccine mandates — impacting store shelves: Metro

Vaccine mandates for truckers have raised transportation costs — but haven’t impacted the shipment of goods to stores, the head of one of Canada’s largest grocery chains says. Instead, Metro president and CEO Eric La Fleche said Tuesday the biggest impact on Canada’s food industry supply chain has been worker absenteeism due to COVID-19 protocols.
The labour shortage caused by quarantined workers has impacted the entire supply chain — including retail stores, distribution centres and suppliers as well as transportation — driving sporadic outages of certain products, he said. ”The domino effect clearly has had an impact over the last month on supply chain,” La Fleche said.
Yet while there might be less depth and variety to Metro’s product assortment than usual, La Fleche said “there’s still food on store shelves.” “There’s certainly less variety than there should be and we’re not as full as we’d like to be,” he said. “But we’re not missing food out there.”
Meanwhile, the worst of the product delays and shortages might have passed, La Fleche said.
“More and more people that were infected are back at work, both at our suppliers and in our own operations,” he said. “It’s improving every day. Every week, we’re getting better. ”Still, inflation is expected to persist, especially in transportation.
“Costs are up,” La Fleche said. “It’s higher inflation than normal in our business. We’re getting cost increases from our suppliers and we are managing our prices at retail as best we can.”
He said shipping costs have faced “significant inflation” over the past year, with an added jump earlier this month when Canada and the U.S. ushered in vaccine mandates at the border that have caused trucker shortages. “We felt an immediate increase in the transportation costs for that,” La Fleche said. “But I can’t say that we have huge shipping issues affecting delivery of goods to our stores. ”He added: “Overall, I think on the trucking side we are well serviced. Diane Brisebois, Retail Council of Canada president and CEO, said the supply chain is being impacted by multiple factors from labour shortages to weather events like flooding and wildfires.
“I wish I could simply say it’s because there aren’t enough truckers, but it’s much more complex than that,” she said.
”Source: montreal.ctvnews.ca/