adminAS KFC wrestles with chicken shortages that saw it temporarily close some of its outlets, top fast-food chains Famous Brands and Nando’s say they are also battling supply chain crunches courtesy of unrelenting load shedding.
Famous Brands, which owns Wimpy and Steers, confirmed yesterday that it had “experienced procurement shortages caused by sustained load shedding.
Geoff Whyte, CEO of Africa, Middle East and Asia for Nando’s, said load shedding was affecting chicken production along with deliveries to restaurants.
“From our perspective it has put us under enormous pressure, but we have managed to keep all of our restaurants fully supplied and open.”
He said from a production point of view, producers’ processing plants require “massive amounts of power” which makes it impractical for them to have backup generation to keep facilities running during load shedding.
“The problem is these are huge production facilities and they require so much power that it is not really practical to put down enough generation to allow them to run when the power goes down. They have been working around load shedding. As long as load shedding is two hours during a normal working day, then they can cope. But if you are having eight hours a day of load shedding every day, then it all starts falling over.
“If you have very heavy load shedding that is continual, it makes it impossible to operate effectively and you have shortages, and then you have the logistics challenges on the back of that.”
This week, KFC temporarily closed 70 of its stores as its chicken suppliers struggled with constant power outages.
The fast-food group was struggling with a shortage of “chicken on the bone” supplies with outlets in North Gauteng (Pretoria) and KwaZulu-Natal mainly affected.
Astral Foods, SA’s largest chicken producer, confirmed it was “one of a number of chicken suppliers into the KFC network”, adding that load shedding had “severely impacted” its ability to supply licensed or “specification type products” to the quick service restaurant (QSR) category.
“The load shedding has resulted in the bird age and bird weights moving out, and hence less birds available in the specific weight ranges and portion sizes needed for the QSR channel.”
Astral also said the supply constraints were affecting “fast food/quick dining restaurants as a channel” and “not just KFC”.
Yesterday, KFC South Africa said it was “working hard” to ensure no further stores are affected and that “those that are impacted are operational again as soon as possible”.
“Over 900 KFC restaurants are still serving many of our fan favourite meals and we expect full operations to return in the coming weeks.” – News24.com.
Mathew Masinge
Online Reporter