Popcorn shortage?

[Frank Cox]

I hadn't heard anything about a shortage of popcorn before this week but one of my customers asked me the other day if I've had any problems getting popcorn because there's a shortage. He said there's no popcorn in the grocery stores that he can find, which would be those smaller retail packages of various brands. I said I hadn't heard anything about it.

Then I ordered more popcorn and got my order today. I ordered seven 50lb bags and got six. I ordered 7 boxes of 85 oz containers and got 2.

I just ran "popcorn shortage" through google and found a bunch of news articles saying that there's a shortage.

Here's one: https://fortune.com/2022/06/02/popco...summer-movies/

Theater owners are worried. Supply-chain issues with popcorn could bring about a concession crisis that cuts deep into their profit margins.

The Wall Street Journal reports that farmers are growing less popcorn these days, focusing instead on soybeans or other types of corn, which they can sell for more money. That’s not an immediate problem, but could become one as we get deeper into summer.

One company is already paying growers more to encourage them to keep the popcorn corn planted.

It’s not just popcorn. The liners of popcorn containers that keep the grease from coating people’s pants as they hold the bucket or bag on their lap are getting harder to find. And the tight labor market is making it harder for some theaters to adequately staff concession stands.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

The reason for the shortage is because farmers are growing 4% less popcorn this year. It's not a supply chain problem... It's a head end production problem. Also, the amount they grow is likely based on what they sold the year before, and cinemas had not quite come back to 100% yet.. No idea what percentage they are growing in Canada though...