Hershey's recently announced that they might not have an adequate supply of candy for Halloween this year. John Ogilvy is the Branch Manager of supply chain company OEC Group, and he joined KMOX to explain the situation.
"Yeah, it's a concern. I believe though, to calm everyone down a bit, I think Hershey's has since now come out and said they're going to be okay," Ogilvy said. "There'll be enough on the shelves for the holiday season. So that's good news."
But, Ogilvy said, it points to other supply chain disruptions that we've seen over the past couple of years.
"In the supply chain business for chocolate, cocoa comes from certain regions of the world. You're getting it from Brazil, West Africa, Ecuador," he said. "Sugar is coming in. They're using a lot of beet sugar for US production, but also getting it from Mexico, Brazil, India, Belize. So you've got a lot of factors that have to come together perfectly."
He said a lot of factors have come together worldwide in the past year to make things difficult, whether that's war, COVID or worker shortages.
He said that while the candy will indeed be on the shelves for Halloween, there could be some price markups.
"Everything costs more right now. So the cost of the raw materials have gone up. The cost of transportation has gone up," he said. "We all see it in stores and every product that we buy so unfortunately inflation is certainly here and real."
Listen to the full conversation from Total Information AM: