ST. JOHN'S, N.L. — If you didn’t go shopping yourself, you likely saw the pictures and videos.
In many St. John’s grocery stores on Tuesday, milk was out of the cooler and into a cart as quickly as employees could moooove the cartons.
And on social media, it was milk mania.
“Never been so thankful for milk,” one person wrote on Facebook with a photo of a 2L carton in a grocery bag.
There were people posting about which stores still had milk, which stores had run out, substitutes people could use instead of fresh cow’s milk and so on.
Milk giant Central Dairies planned for the blizzard by completing almost all of last Friday’s deliveries in advance, but once stores opened Tuesday after a four-day hiatus, the inventories dropped.
“As soon as the stores opened, citizens quickly emptied store shelves." -Diane Jubinville, director of public relations and external communications with Agropur, a dairy collective of which Central Dairies is a part.
“The high demand creates low inventories in store, resulting in extra delivery requests that our team cover to the maximum,” she said.
Since Monday, the company has added extra trucks to speed up distribution.
And even though Wednesday is usually designated for factory maintenance, this week the plant continued production instead.
That was “to cover demand, as well as the lost production day Friday (Jan. 17)” due to the blizzard, said Jubinville.
“Our co-ordinators and drivers work early in the morning until late to cover delivery requests to the maximum of the capacities in place.”
And it wasn’t just a run on milk.
Other locally produced grocery staples, such as eggs, were also affected by the blizzard and subsequent state of emergency.
Newfoundland Eggs is headquartered on Roache’s Line in Clarke’s Beach.
Controller Randy Fowler said the company couldn’t start deliveries to St. John’s until Tuesday once some restrictions were lifted on the state of emergency that has been in place since Jan. 17.
“We’re trying to get eggs out as fast as we can to all our customers,” said Fowler.
He said the company had an extra delivery truck operating since Tuesday to help replenish stocks in St. John’s.
Other than that, it was business as usual, he said.
“The only little delay that I would call it is that the Monday we weren’t allowed into St. John’s, we couldn’t deliver then. Besides that, back Tuesday we were there again, and we’ve been goin’ full tilt ever since.”
Twitter: @juanitamercer_
