I've been working in the manufacturing side of the industry for the 35 to 40 years right up to the time I retired I can safely say that the JIT method does indeed have its place in the business model. That place is in the high value luxury goods market, and not in the food chain or the basic commodity arena.
Sounds like you think food manufacturers will struggle to ramp up production quickly, to cope with the surge in demand?
In a nutshell, yes I do believe that they will struggle to ramp up to meet the challenge. The problem rests with the basic concept of JIT system. It very heavily relies on the sales teams getting an accurate sales forecast into the production planning Dept, not just 1 month in advance but often up to 6 months in advance. Then the bean counters can decide on the right balance in their view, on the stock levels and optimum order values to try to stay a few days ahead of the curve.
This process is repeated all the way down the chain from the producers, it affects all the suppliers of the various ingredients of the finished product and then that in turn rolls down to the farmers / growers who do not want to grow crops with all the expensive fertilisers etc involved, just to plough in the ground again because there is not the market for it. This is all in the name of profits.
Before JIT, if a farmer over produced then the price dropped in order to move that over capacity on through the food chain to the consumer to encourage them to buy and consume extra and it worked well until the bean counters became involved and all in the process of increased profits.
Nobody could have forecast the Covid19 virus would come along cause such unprecedented demand and now the weakest link in the chain is the farmer who cannot respond quickly enough.
I don't think production is an issue here. We are already choosy about what we accept into the supply chain (bent carrots go to animal feed stock etc). A larger supply can be provided if we just ignore that for a bit. And the supply is definitely there. The issue is not really JIT here either I don't think which is possible if done correctly with decent mathematical modelling, but the centralisation of suppliers around supermarkets in this case. Typically they organise everything in a hub/spoke model for distribution balancing purposes so they can feed in from one supplier and out to multiple stores. That means total system capacity is defined by the throughput of each spoke, the redundancy model of each spoke and the capacity of the distribution centre to store and route products. If someone places demand then the capacity is entirely limited by the narrowest point and that is always defined to be as cheap as possible on a normal basis, not effective in a crisis, because of the race to the bottom pricing of our supermarkets has squeezed every bit of economy out of the situation. On top of that usually you end up with supply chains being manually managed so when Tesco puts in an order for half a million bog rolls for next week, the manufacturer produces them and ships them and then their drivers have to queue up outside the tesco distribution centre, leaning on their trucks smoking and being moaned at by their wives for hours at a time. This is because there is no space to put them because of capacity and unloading problems.
Also on top of that the architecture fails because the entire process requires an army of truck drivers, unloaders, shelf stackers etc some of whom are actually sick or pretending to be at least
![Laughing :-DD](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/smiley_laughing.gif.pagespeed.ce._hfWAz_QHO.gif)
. You can walk into our local tesco at the moment with an ID, two arms, two legs and be starting work an hour later.
Source: did two years working on ERP systems for this stuff.