Mallee food business counts the cost of lockdown hit

FOR businesses such as Mallee Meats and More, timing is everything.

As Victoria was plunged into its sixth lockdown on Thursday night, with less than four hours’ notice, the Mildura business was left with $10,000 worth of cancelled orders.

Owner Gavin Cox said to make matters worse, a new delivery of fresh stock arrived the same night to replenish orders that were due to be delivered.

“This time we got caught with both the stock that was ready to go out and the stock coming in, and it was too late to cancel any of it,” Mr Cox said.

“The day that (lockdown) falls on can make it harder and this was the worst one.”

He said workers had spent all Thursday cutting and packing meat and making up orders to put on pallets ready for delivery to hotels, taverns and clubs in Swan Hill, Balranald and Robinvale the following morning.

However, due to the lockdown announcement, he instead had to pay them to come in early Friday to unpack the majority of the truck so it could still do a run to a small number of businesses that still needed their orders.

“The run itself isn’t viable anymore but you still have to send the truck,” Mr Cox said.

“We went from 25 customers to eight.”

“It’s just a lose-lose today, unfortunately … but there’s plenty of people worse off than us, I’m sure, and at least we can still trade.”

Mr Cox said while Mallee Meats and More tried to offload the excess stock with specials, particularly for fresh produce, much would end up being thrown out.

“Some places order eight boxes of salad mix, which will only last a week, if that, but we can’t sell it in time.

“It’s lucky I have a few sheep in my back paddock – they were eating like kings last week.”

He said the cost of the lockdown to his business was hard to pinpoint, with a lot of the stock loss becoming evident a week or two after the lockdown period.

“Today we have thrown out $500 worth of cream and that was from the last lockdown … and last week we had 160kg of zucchinis we were trying to move off the shelves.

“And in all of this there’s other products sitting on shelves that are slowly going out of date. You might have 30 buckets of gravy worth $75 each – it adds up.

“We’ve got a lot of full-time staff as well, so you’re still paying them even when we aren’t as busy, plus the cost of the stock you have to throw out and the loss of business as well.”

To add to the already challenging times, just last week Mr Cox bought a new business, Sunraysia Chickens.

“We’ve just taken on another nine or 10 staff there, so we couldn’t afford to be going into lockdown many more times because it is hurting the back pocket.”