
Organizing a Group Buy of Flour - luu
https://www.jefftk.com/p/organizing-a-group-buy-of-flour
======
greedo
Our grocery chain has been buying rice and flour in bulk from restaurant
supply houses and repackaging them in 1lb bags. Pretty agile if you ask me.

~~~
baybal2
I think big supermarkers are making things worse at the moment.

It was very hard to get basic supplies and food when all small shops were
ordered to close, and only big supermarkets were kept open, and supplied by
organised convoys.

This appears to be rational at first, but it only led to people all rushing to
those few supermarkets the moment the convoy arrives, and them being emptied
clean by first 50 something people.

It also led to wholesale bases being emptied by supermarkets, as they have the
biggest buying power, and biggest truck fleets. Here, I heard that they went
through more than 8 months supply of flour in just few weeks.

The situation got much better when small shops were let to open.

Both supermarkets, and wholesalers are of course very happy with that, but
that left near nothing for small shops when they reopened.

~~~
dickjocke
In North America are non-supermarkets and non-warehouses even 5% of grocery
retail? I think that restaurants being allowed to sell groceries would've been
cool. But I don't see how mom and pop grocers move the needle at all here.

~~~
djrogers
>I think that restaurants being allowed to sell groceries would've been cool.

At least 2 restaraunts in my town do this. Order online, drive around beck
(sometimes with a line of cars, but never more than a 5 minute wait), and they
drop your food/tp/etc in the trunk. Much better than hitting up Safeway or
Costco, and not really much more expensive.

~~~
tingletech
I think the pizza place at DNA lounge sells TP along with the pizza.

------
radec
Otherwise known as a Food Buying Club. basic idea is you get enough people
together to create a wholesale account with a distributor. Get your order and
split it up between the members. Hippies and other Frugal people have been
doing this forever (in my world forever, I grew up going to them).

~~~
davefp
Niche hobby communities do this all the time.

The mechanical keyboard community wouldn't exist without group buys, they rely
on them to hit minimum order quantities from producers of custom keycaps,
PCBs, and other manufactured items. These are then shipped to proxy vendors
around the world who do last-mile shipping to end users.

Homebrew clubs also put in wholesale orders for raw materials like yeast,
grain, and hops. These are usually more localized given the large volumes
involved, and involve a physical meetup where the goods are repackaged and
distributed to the buyers.

I daresay there are more groups like this (home bakers maybe?) but they're
largely invisible outside their own circles.

~~~
jedimastert
This is kind of the point behind drop.com, no?

~~~
lunias
Drop has been transitioning away from group buys for sometime now. Since their
re-branding their strategy appears more reminiscent of private labeling.

Most products have Drop / Massdrop in the name now.

The most recent two actual (keyboard) group buys that I participated in have
been really poorly handled. One is still delayed and has not shipped (order
placed 561 days ago). The other shipped broken (to everyone in the drop) after
being delayed for months. I had to manually ISP flash a bootloader.

~~~
davefp
> I had to manually ISP flash a bootloader.

I read about that problem with the Tokyo60 v3. Seems like a big problem with
quality control, that should have been fixed by sending a new, working
versions of the PCB to all customers.

I'm currently waiting on some Aqua Zilents which are delayed thanks to the
current pandemic. I understand the delay, but they waited until the posted
ship date (April 10th) to inform customers that it's going to be late. That
rubbed me the wrong way for sure.

------
jahn716
Based in Paris, France - even prior to the lockdown, bakeries sold baking-
related supplies if you knew how to ask (flour, yeast, pre-made dough at
various stages, etc.).

But now they sell it like a main product; even today when I went to buy some
bread at one of my local shops, they had sacks of flour set up in the
storefront and showcases.

~~~
adultSwim
I had no idea! TY!

------
MisterBastahrd
This isn't really a political point as much as an observation, but... the
people in this country who have the worst compensation and benefits are the
ones who are involved in the harvesting and preparation of our food. To this
point, the supply chain hasn't been too badly affected because poor people
need to work to survive and so they'll go to work sick. But now COVID has
spread all over the place, and people who are in those fields and
slaughterhouses and factories are starting to fall ill. Smithfield just shut
down a massive pork processing plant. What happens to our food supply when
those people finally say they've had enough? Lack of healthcare, lack of pay,
lack of sick days... would YOU willing subject yourself and your family to the
possibility that you will catch it and die when your co-worker comes to work
with a fever?

In my opinion, we haven't even begun to feel the economic shock of this thing,
because we've been able to ignore the foundations of our society for so long.

~~~
bruceb
There is not a shortage of people who have very little money and will take
risks.

~~~
kyleee
One of the reasons why it is so unethical to rely so heavily on streams of
undocumented immigrants

------
sneak
I hope we strengthen and cross link our food supply chains on a local and
regional basis like this more in the future.

Having most everyone in a city or neighborhood buying from a single chainlink
or two isn’t a very resilient system, nor does it make for very efficient
markets.

Commodities like flour should be available sort of like data on ipfs; the
problem is, of course, trust and risk of tampering. Hopefully it won’t be much
of an issue and more decentralized supply chains can emerge, making more
opportunities for more people.

I’d love to be able to be a local cache node in the food supply chain (or web,
perhaps), as I imagine others would be.

~~~
gegtik
I think you just invented grocery stores

~~~
sneak
No. Everyone in my vicinity buys their non-restaurant food from 2-3 grocery
stores. I am talking about having the community's food supply be provided by
more suppliers, and each other, p2p style. Perhaps a data-driven "farmer's
market" style setup.

Distributed, not just hub-and-spoke decentralized. We just watched the failure
mode of that one.

~~~
XorNot
No we didn't, we watched a supply chain shock which could've been prevented if
we had some common-sense regulation to require supermarkets and grocery stores
to enact purchasing limits if their demand curves start behaving anomalously.

Distributed systems in software are hard. Th idea it'll somehow be easier when
you need to truck tonnes of physical goods around is wishful thinking - the
same failure modes still apply.

~~~
ghaff
Around where I live, supermarkets started imposing limits pretty quickly. It's
in their self-interest not to piss off customers who come into buy something
and leave empty-handed.

------
lokl
Any (developing world) group buy experts here? Many years ago, I considered
trying to organize fertilizer group buys in sub-Saharan Africa via SMS, where
it seemed (to me, as a non-expert in this subject) that many smallholder
farmers lacked access to affordable high-quality fertilizer and that group
buying might help. I explored this enough to apply for a grant to develop it
(and delivery logistics), but that didn't come through and I didn't pursue it
further. Has something like this been tried? Is it needed? Seeing this article
brought it all back.

~~~
vikoonishmoog
In East Africa, there are at least two operations that I'm aware of that do
this among other things - One Acre Fund
([https://oneacrefund.org/](https://oneacrefund.org/)), and Apollo Agriculture
([https://www.apolloagriculture.com/](https://www.apolloagriculture.com/)).

~~~
lokl
Thanks very much!

~~~
anticsapp
also [http://pricepally.com](http://pricepally.com)

------
devchix
> Webstaurant would ship a pallet of flour, 50 bags of 50lbs each, for $1,081
> or $0.43/lb.

> Unfortunately, between placing the order and them shipping it they ran out
> of stock

Insanity! I'm heartened that people are still baking at home though. For
comparison, retail King Arthur All-Purpose flour goes for about $3.69 for
5lbs, or $0.73/lb, so at $0.56/lb Sir Galahad flour is still a bargain. Whole
wheat flour has bran and germ and the oil they contain make it harder to store
than white flour, so I wouldn't buy a lot of it.

Flour is for more than just bread. Top of my head: tart shell, pizza dough,
tortilla, thickening up sauces, can't make a roux or a bechamel without flour,
fresh pasta, cookies, muffins, cakes.

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
I question how many people are actually using the flour they're hoarding, and
how many are just putting it in the back of the pantry because, "When the end
of the world comes, you'll need flour!"

It's very irritating for those of us who actually bake on a regular basis and
_resisted_ the temptation to hoard for hoarding's sake.

~~~
ApolloFortyNine
I present to you this commenter, who just bought 200 lbs of flour.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22885192](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22885192)

Hoarders suck, especially super hoarders like this.

~~~
nullc
> I do go through a lot of it. My hobby is baking.

Please don't reflexively characterize people who do different things or have
different needs as "super hoarders".

~~~
ApolloFortyNine
If you're willing to dismiss 200 lbs of flour as hobby levels, then do you
even believe in hoarding at all?

We're talking enough flour to make 200 loaves. At best, they bought a 3 month
supply of flour (and that is baking 2 loaves every day). At worst, this is
more flour than they can possibly use, and a large amount of it will go bad
(storing 200 lbs of flour inside is a bit of a challenge, so it may be stored
in a garage or worse).

And of course, with every product in the grocery store, if we all go out and
buy a 3 month or further supply of a basic good, there's not going to be any
left. Which only encourages more hoarding.

~~~
nullc
I don't know about willing to dismiss but you're making assumptions about
facts not in evidence. For all you know the poster is cooking for 6 adults.

Moreover, ... whats wrong with a three months supply of flour? For the last
few years we've maintained that much flour at my house-- just because its a
convenient level to purchase/manage for us, nothing to do with preparedness
(which, incidentally, is virtuous), and certainly not any kind of hording.

~~~
jefftk
I totally agree with you. The more people that maintain a 3m supply of non-
perishables and rotate through them, the more robust society will be to
problems like this one.

Households also vary a lot in size: ours is six adults and two kids, so we do
go through a lot of food.

------
pheleven
Some of my local restaurants are doing this - effectively becoming concierge
grocers who will break down bulk quantities for their customers. Call an order
in and pick it up in ~24 hours. They have and can get almost anything the
grocery stores are out of including TP (in jumbo commercial rolls), flour,
eggs, meats, etc.

------
TuringNYC
There used to be a startup "Mercado" in the dot com days where consumers could
form buyer's groups. It worked well for a while until the downturn.

~~~
Jsharm
I was just thinking why doesn't this exist!

~~~
OrangeMango
Isn't this what Groupon started out as?

~~~
TuringNYC
Groupon is retailer lead. These other services were consumer led, like "I want
to buy this -- will 50 people join me so we can collectively pay wholesale?"

------
driverdan
I guess this depends on where you live. I went to the store three days ago
(April 12) and the baking aisle was fully stocked, including all the flour.

------
darkerside
Some restaurants, with shrinking demand, are now selling their flour to
consumers

~~~
prawn
We bought a 25lb bag from a baking school that had been forced to close.

------
tingletech
If you are in Oakland, Firebrand -- a bakery on Broadway in uptown -- has
flour and yeast some mornings on their square site. You order on square, and
come by to pick up. [https://firebrand-artisan-
breads.square.site](https://firebrand-artisan-breads.square.site)

------
Finnucane
I’ve thought about buying one of those big sacks of flour—I bake bread and
other stuff routinely, so I know I’d use it up eventually. I mean, I just got
a half-pound of vanilla beans. But storage becomes an issue. I’m already
struggling a bit to find places for the extra stocking up.

~~~
ghaff
Even something like flour doesn't really last forever--especially if you don't
have ideal storage conditions. Maybe you bake enough though.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
eh, just look at the weevils as extra protein.

------
pavelmark
Haven't had too many problems by hunting around, using local retailers, and
asking at bakeries.

Might help? [https://helpatmyhome.com/where-to-buy-flour-
online/](https://helpatmyhome.com/where-to-buy-flour-online/)

~~~
awinder
Thank you for this, I put in an order with lindley like a week and a half ago
and they’re swamped. Hoping it pans out but will definitely hedge with one of
these others if things go south.

~~~
dceddia
We put in an order with them a couple weeks ago (Monday 3/30), we didn't hear
anything at all for about 2 solid weeks, and then got a shipping notification
on Friday 4/10\. It was shipped overnight and arrived Saturday 4/11\. Hang in
there!

------
acdw
Love this idea!

I'm sending out feelers locally to see if anyone is interested (I'm in
Louisiana), and so far I've got a little interest. I was wondering if you'd
come into any problems other than the animal thing with your experience, or if
there's anything else I might need to know. I was wondering how you found
people who wanted to participate? And how you organized it. If it was all
friends, or if it was people you didn't really know or found online. I don't
have a ton of friends who are really into this so I'm kind of casting a wider
net.

~~~
jefftk
_> come into any problems other than the animal thing_

I could imagine someone having issues with theft depending on the area, but
that's not something I'm worried about here.

If you did end up getting a pallet you'd want to make sure that either they
could put the pallet where you wanted it or that you had the equipment to move
the pallet.

 _> I was wondering how you found people who wanted to participate?_

I wrote to a few groups:

* Facebook: primarily friends in the contra dance community

* Work email list

* Email to area family

* Email to area college friends

It ended up being a mix of all these groups.

If I wasn't doing it with friends then pickup is harder. I trusted my friends
to pay me and to pick up from my porch unattended -- that would be harder with
a group put together from, say, reddit

~~~
acdw
Thanks for the reply! I've poked around on Facebook and Nextdoor; I'm
considering emailing work to see who'd be into it as well. Good point about
the ~danger of randoms~.

------
anticsapp
This exists already in the white hot Lagos startup scene. It is called
Pricepally: [https://pricepally.com](https://pricepally.com)

------
ccoggins
This seems a bit expensive. I recently bought a 25lb bag of flour from Sams
club and it was 6.50, or about 26 cents a pound. They also had plenty in
stock. Costco also has it for a similar price. Last time I bought yeast there
it's also cheap - about 5 or 6 bucks for something like 2lbs(which is a
ridiculous amount of baking yeast). Baking a lot can make this practically
worth the cost of the membership.

~~~
ghaff
You're comparing probably the most expensive mass market flour (King Arthur)
with probably about the cheapest (Walmart's). A 2x-3x price differential
sounds about right.

~~~
jefftk
(author)

The original flour we were thinking of buying was
[https://www.webstaurantstore.com/all-purpose-
flour-50-lb/104...](https://www.webstaurantstore.com/all-purpose-
flour-50-lb/104HR.html) $12.25/bag (50lb), mildly cheaper than the Sam's Club
price above. But then adding in shipping on a truck from PA added another
$9.40/bag.

In places where people can easily buy individual 25lb bags for $6.50, though,
you don't need to organize a group buy!

------
jarjoura
Okay, but with all this flour, where is the yeast? I've actually been lucky to
find plenty of flour at the local Mexican or Asian markets. Yet, no where I
look have I been able to find even a tiny package of yeast. It's out all over
the place.

------
irrational
My local stores are totally sold out of flour. I had to travel to a different
state to pick up my daughter from college. While traveling, I stopped at a
Costco for gas. On a whim I went into the store and they actually had some
flour available. I purchased about 200 lbs, even though I had to pay sales
tax, since I have no idea when flour will again be available in my area.

When I got home my wife asked me if they had toilet paper too. Doh!

~~~
soared
Flour goes bad in <8 months. I hope your using a pound a day.

~~~
irrational
I do go through a lot of it. My hobby is baking. The day after I got home I
made 2 2-lb loaves with my mother starter.

------
baybal2
It is surprising to me that the West has hit food security issues earlier than
Asia.

The food supply chain in US is much better than in Europe, and Europe is
better than most of Asia.

A week ago, I was very scared myself for there being a 21st century famine in
Asia, but I never could've imagined how bad panic buying can hit countries
even with robust food supply chains.

~~~
samatman
These aren't food security issues, these are supply chain issues.

The difference is enormous, and it's far too soon to relax about famine. We'll
know if that happened by about 2023.

~~~
baybal2
A time when people can't eat food _IS_ a food security issue. Do not invent
other names for it.

The Irish famine has happened when UK was drowning in corn, and had the best
harvest in many years.

The Bengal famine has happened in times when most regions of India had
otherwise at least bearable harvests.

The Ukrainian famine has happened in times when the soviet union had bumper
harvests, and was exporting megatons of grains, and other foods.

The Great Chinese Famine has happened when Mao too has tried the same trick as
soviets did, except it failed on him even worse, like ten times as much.

Bangladesh 1973 famine has happened when Bangladesh was awash with
humanitarian aid.

The chronic undernutrition of socially marginalised groups in 1st world
countries keeps happening with governments throwing billions of cash on food
stamp programs.

~~~
robocat
> A time when people can't eat food IS a food security issue

If no food is available, sure. If other food is available, no way. Are people
starving in the US yet due to food unavailability?

~~~
baybal2
Have you not seen news of people in the US not able to buy any normal food for
weeks, and having to subsist on things like potato chips, and instant noodles?

And, yeah. Having a double digit of your (American) population being socially
marginalised, relying on unreliable food stamp program, and having no
alternative to junk food should've also been called a genuine food crisis long
ago.

Famines do happen even when there is food on the shelves, like in Yemen, early
nineties China, or late ussr.

~~~
samatman
I lived in an American food desert for about six months. I hated it! All I
could get was cheap burgers and hot dogs and chicken...

The main health problem facing the poorest Americans is obesity, with opioid
addiction a close second. Famine is not an issue here and I hope it stays that
way.

I'm genuinely unsure what point you're trying to make, but there's an enormous
gap between the supply chain being unable to fill the shelves as fast as
they're emptied, and the country not having food to put back on those shelves.
That's the point I'm trying to make.

~~~
baybal2
Well, it's certainly nothing like a catastrophic famine, yet it bares the
existing problem with food security in US, and it came really close to the
level of something genuinely concerning.

Watch for reports of wholesalers going through many month worth of food
staples. In Kazakhstan, where I am stuck now, the government came out and
asked "where will we get 8 month worth of grain now?" in response to panic
buying. Full shelves now came at the cost of many months worth of supplies.
Biggest food silos went through 1/3 of annual throughput volume in just 2
weeks here.

> I lived in an American food desert for about six months. I hated it! All I
> could get was cheap burgers and hot dogs and chicken...

> The main health problem facing the poorest Americans is obesity, with opioid
> addiction a close second. Famine is not an issue here and I hope it stays
> that way.

I spent 6 years of my life in between Vancouver, Canada, and Seattle in US.

It was a big surprise to be that finding what otherwise be "normal" food was
relatively hard, and you even had to pay extra for it. I was later told that
Vancouver is considered very good on that side, and Seattle is actually better
than most other US cities.

------
khazhoux
Unpopular opinion: maybe so many people don't need to suddenly become bakers
who weren't baking before, and then we wouldn't have empty shelves all of the
sudden.

~~~
ChristianBundy
It's a shame that people are learning new things and experimenting with new
hobbies to keep themselves busy during quarantine. All change is bad, but
_especially_ personal growth.

But really though, a family buying 5 pounds of flour isn't the problem, it's
the hoarders loading up shopping carts full of toilet paper and flour that
give us empty shelves. I think we'd have enough for everyone if we didn't have
greedy hoarders.

~~~
jdashg
You don't really need hoarders to have a problem. If only twice as many
households are cooking now than before, instead of stores having say 10%
slack, they run out half way through the week. If you have four times as many
people cooking, you run out your slack in two days.

So the store increases their orders. But their _suppliers_ only have X% slack.
So _they_ have to ramp up too. The whole supply/demand balance takes time to
stabilize.

The same number of people are eating the same calories as before, but the
supply chains for those calories have shifted rapidly. Same for toilet paper:
No one's pooping on company time anymore!

Yes there are some hoarders, but we'd get temporary problems even with 0%
hoarders.

~~~
ceejayoz
Yep. It was basically a Thanksgiving-level event without the usual months of
prep work preceding it.

~~~
mindslight
The situation has given me a new perspective on the ultimate purpose of all
those sales around Thanksgiving. The stores _know_ they're going to be selling
a large amount of items _some time_ before Thanksgiving. But they can't just
order large quantities of items, only to store them until people decide to buy
them. Rather, the sales let the supply chain control when people will be
buying the bulk quantities, so the goods can arrive in stores as close to
being sold as possible.

------
lidHanteyk
I recently had no problem buying organic flour from the organic aisle, despite
the regular aisle being sold out. People are stupid when they panic.

~~~
squillesque
This story reaffirms my sense that the recent explanation du jour for
scarcity, residential vs commercial supply chains, isn't quite right. This
person set out to buy an order of 250 lb of flour and it still vanished before
their eyes.

My experience with commercial toilet paper has been the same, watching it dry
up just like retail. People seem to be stockpiling cheap familiar essentials,
plain and simple, wherever they can get it.

~~~
ghaff
Who knows what's going on in the commercial supply chain though. The usual
buyers are canceling orders so the upstream distributors--maybe even
manufacturers--are also canceling without necessarily anticipating being able
to sell direct to consumers.

That said...

>People seem to be stockpiling cheap familiar essentials, plain and simple,
wherever they can get it.

I'm sure there's some truth to this. I'm not stocking up on huge quantities of
things I don't need. But, for example, a couple weeks ago there happened to be
one bag of my favored flour in the store so I grabbed it even though I wasn't
necessarily at the point where I would normally buy it. I also have an extra
dozen eggs at home. Etc.

Multiply that behavior by most people and that's a _lot_ of extra buying from
stores and inventory scattered around everyone's houses even though most
people aren't doing the two-year supply of beans level of prepping.

