https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/31/business/totinos-pizza-rolls-ingredients.html
"It takes about 21 ingredients to make a Totino’s pizza roll, the bite-size
snack that soared in popularity during the pandemic as people sought
easy-to-make meals.
And on any given day since last winter, at least one of those ingredients, if
not many, has either been difficult to find or insanely expensive.
The shortages became so bad at one point that General Mills, which makes
Totino’s, simply couldn’t produce enough.
“We had lots of empty shelves,” said Jon Nudi, the company’s president of North
America. “Every time we had something fixed, something else popped up.”
General Mills is not used to empty shelves. The company sells $19 billion worth
of food a year, everything from Chex and Cheerios cereals, Annie’s organic
Cheddar bunnies and Betty Crocker cake mixes to pet food under the Blue Buffalo
brand. With 26 factories in North America, it juggles 13,000 ingredients from
around the world for its many products.
So the company’s scientists, supply chain heads and procurement managers began
meeting daily late last year. The solution? The company found 25 ways —
recipes, if you will — to make the pizza rolls, each with a slightly different
list of ingredients, swapping in cornstarches, for example, for tapioca starch
that had become hard to find, or substituting one kind of potato starch for
another."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
