These items are moving through the supply chain, but cannot reach the stores quickly enough so retailers have asked suppliers to produce more. But even as farmers and slaughterhouses ramp up, producing food takes time. In the poultry industry, it takes 10 days for a chicken egg to incubate and hatch, and then five to six weeks for the bird to grow to maturity. For some chicken suppliers, the process takes even longer, depending on the type of bird. But no algorithm could predict this extraordinary moment, leading to widespread out-of-stocks of hundreds of household necessities.

Source: New York Times March 15, 2020 18:11 UTC