Baby Formula

How many shortages have we/you experienced in the last two years of the pandemic? New cars, used cars, toilet paper, masks, PPE in general, nurses, toilet paper, sanitizing wipes, wood products, fuel, water, anything else? Oh, yes: baby formula.

This last and current one is but another example of how we live in a just-in-time world with centralized production, off shoring of all sorts of finished items and components, combined with supply chain foul-ups, stuck ships at ports in the Suez Canal, and not enough truck drivers, cooks, dishwashers, construction workers and, in Seattle, concrete.

While I personally work to promote disaster resilience, the world we live in is making that very difficult due to many different factors. We have converted to a “one world” economy where our linkages create strengths like cost savings and weaknesses, like dependencies.

Having only a few manufacturers of baby formula means that when only one plant that makes the formula is offline, we come up short nationally.

Thinking about gasoline prices, we’d better hope that a major pipeline somewhere or a refinery doesn’t have an explosion or some other mishap that further drives up the cost of that liquid gold we use in our cars and trucks. Note, the current price for what would be a gallon of gasoline in Germany is $8.14.