What happened to the coronavirus preppers who rushed out and stripped the supermarket shelves of loo rolls, pasta and other essentials?
The loo roll went first, multipacks of it, stuffed into the boots of family cars or carted home in carrier bags. Next was the pasta, tinned soup, dried legumes and – bizarrely, given that Covid at no point threatened the UK’s water supply – mineral water. Many scoffed at these coronavirus preppers in February, dismissing them as cranks. Then, as social media filled up with images of ransacked shelves, many went out and joined them. Supermarkets had the eerie, desolate quality of a disaster movie. It was weird.
But what became of these Covid stockpilers? In February, we met James Blake, the owner of Europe’s largest emergency food supplier, in a near-empty warehouse – freeze-dried macaroni cheese and chicken fried rice were flying off the shelves – when Covid hadn’t yet reached UK shores, but was already the only thing that anyone could talk about. He ran out of his stock within weeks of our meeting. “It’s been crazy busy,” he says. “When lockdown occurred, volumes skyrocketed. We did something like two or three years’ annual turnover in two months.” It has been frenetic work, getting all these orders out and sourcing more stock. “There were 10-week waits for some orders and people were still ordering, despite that,” he says. It took him until June to clear the backlog of orders.