Slow starts to the year are part of the normal ebb and flow for the food industry, but we’ve never before seen sparse motorways and empty ferries like this. Faced with urgent warnings to be ready for an undefined Brexit, and with a pandemic raging, businesses took the only rational decision they could — they planned not to trade. They built stockpiles, slowed down or scaled back.
Now 24 days in, it is not clear how, when, and if volumes will recover to what they were before.
Much of the food industry is finding it very hard to trade. Ministers seem convinced these are “teething problems,” the result of a truculent business community not believing change was coming. “A business won’t make the same mistake
