C.O. grocery stores aim to keep up with summer demand

In the summertime, the demand for groceries is at an all-time high.

With a growth in tourism and population in Central Oregon, the pressure is greater than ever on grocery stores to keep up with the demand.

Joe Anzaldo, general manager of Newport Avenue Market, said he makes sure that his store stays flexible. He has to change and adapt on the fly to keep enough food in the store.

“We’re able to react pretty quickly,” Anzaldo said Thursday. “We have a lot of different distributors we deal with, compared to other companies that might be buying from one main distributor.”

Mike Roth, the store manager at the Bend Fred Meyer, is able to make his best guess to handle the increase in demand.

“What we’ll do is we will extend the amounts that are coming in,” Roth said. “So if we’re normally having a certain amount of product that is brought in. We typically will increase anywhere between say 25 and 40 percent in the summer, depending on how many tourists we have in the area.”

Stores are able to take a look back at past sales to best estimate how much product will be needed during a given time of the year.

“Big about following trends, following the numbers,” Anzaldo said. “So it’s an educated guess, but we’re pretty good at it.”

Stores managers said they hope they will be able to keep up with the demand this summer, as well as during the eclipse, when the demand is predicted to be greater than it has ever been.