A panic erupted on the West Coast this week. Over a drink.
It happened when beverage aficionados learned that tapioca,
the starch used to make the bubbles — or pearls — that are the featured topping
in the popular
boba tea drink, was in short supply.
اضافة اعلان
The impending boba shortage is yet another sign of how the
pandemic has snarled global supply chains, upended industries and created
scarcities of goods from toilet paper and ketchup to electronics. In this case,
a surge of pent-up demand for products assembled abroad, coupled with a
shortage of workers due to coronavirus cases or quarantine protocols, has
caused a month long maritime pileup at ports in Los Angeles and San Francisco
and left ships delivering goods from Asia — including
tapioca — waiting out at
sea.
Boba or bubble tea, a drink that can be made with milk or
fruit-flavored green or black tea, originated in Taiwan and has grown in
popularity and prominence in the United States throughout the 2000s. Boba
suppliers in the San Francisco Bay Area who are running low on tapioca said
their shipments of fully formed boba come from Taiwan, while supplies of
cassava root, which is used to make tapioca, come from Thailand and islands in
the Pacific Ocean.
Arianna Hansen, a sales representative for Fanale Drinks,
which is based in Hayward, California, and supplies boba to thousands of stores
around the country, said shipments had been backed up for several months, and
the company’s stockpile of tapioca is running dangerously low.
The number of container ships waiting at anchor to dock in
Los Angeles or Long Beach, California, peaked at 40 in February, according to
data from the Marine Exchange of Southern California. That declined to 19 ships
Thursday, still far from the usual zero to one ship that was the norm
pre-pandemic, said Kip Louttit, the exchange’s executive director.
Hansen said she expected supply to return to close to normal
levels by the summer.
In the meantime, anxious boba store owners are scrounging
for tapioca.
Brian Tran, co-owner of Honeybear Boba in San Francisco,
said, “A boba shop without boba is like a car dealership without cars to sell.
It’s like a steakhouse without steak.”
Read more lifestyle
.jpg)
.jpg)
