Thank you for all you and your teams are doing to keep the food supply moving. As I’ve visited grocery stores in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, I am amazed at the job our industry is doing from farm to store.
I’ll be quick with tonight’s update on new developments. As always, please check our Coronavirus/COVID-19 webpage frequently, as we update that as we go. A new section today lists the many projects advanced to help your businesses. And, I’m really pleased to see so many of you using our LinkedIn Group to share questions and resources with our peers. It’s gratifying that we’ll pass more than 1,000 group members tonight, a pretty big new network in the past 72 hours.
Here are a few things you need to know from today:
Another important step was today’s partnership announced between USDA and the Department of Labor to work together to facilitate movement of current H2A guest workers from their current contracts as they expire into new contracts within the country. This was a major push by all of us in agriculture.
Along those lines, we learned this morning that the Port of Houston was shut down when a longshoreman tested positive, and would not reopen until Monday. We worked with our importers into Houston, the cold chain sector, other food sectors, Texas retailers, and USDA, and I’m pleased to share that the Port is reopening tonight. This port is a major receiver for citrus, bananas, apples and many other fruits.
While many sectors of our industry have been set back by this crisis, the foodservice sector and foodservice distributors in particular have been devastated by the shutdown of the restaurant and hospitality industry. United Fresh teamed with the International Foodservice Distributors Association (IFDA) to urge the President and Congress to recognize the devastation to the foodservice distribution sector and elevate immediate financial relief for the sector. We’ve gathered financial impact from our produce distributors across the country and continue to use that data to drive home the impact with Congressional leaders working on financial support.
Concurrently, we’ve teamed with the Food Marketing Institute and IFDA to connect foodservice distributors now with extra capacity with retailers across the country with needs. This crisis won’t be over tomorrow, and we need to build new bridges across our supply chains.
I’ll end by once again saying thank you to you and all of our front line teams. It’s important that we all continue to recognize the commitment of our workers from farms through every step in the chain to our consumers. They have kids out of school; they are nervous about their own health; but they are coming to work and keeping the food supply moving.