Why is food not being diverted from commercial premises to supermarkets?

[rjebgf]

There is so much in the news about panic buying. My supermarket shopping has had to massively increase because I have 2 teens home who would normally pick breakfast up on the way to school and eat lunch at school. Often after school, we would stop by at somewhere like subway. So in the region of 12-15 extra meals for them a week are now needed at home that otherwise would have come from "commercial" stock. So now that we are isolated, this quantity of food has had to come from the supermarket. If many people are in this situation then the hit on the supermarkets is massive. How many office workers would have been picking up lunch from a sandwich shop. My dh did this every day. So another 5 meals need to be supplied from the supermarket.

I wonder if there is a lot of food unused and going off that needs redeploying.

They could, but it makes more sense for them to offer take aways to their staff than to start negotiating contracts with supermarkets

Restaurants here than can provide take out or home delivery are doing so. Those that can’t are giving their perishables to the food bank.

There are quite a few food wholesalers I know of (London) which normally supply offices, restaurants, cafes etc but have switched to home delivery or opening to individual customers.

Lots of restaurants, pubs and wholesalers now selling direct to the public. You can order lots of basic foodstuffs online as well from suppliers (I don’t mean like from Ocado), but a bit more expensive. If you have smaller shops near you, I’d go there. I’ve been to our two nearest small village shops in the past week (one this morning) and they were full to the rafters with any food you wanted and stocking more.