Costco Limiting Amount of Meat Items Each Customer Can Purchase

Customers shop at a Costco store in Chicago, Illinois, on Dec. 12, 2018. Scott Olson/Getty Images

Costco announced it is limiting the amount of fresh meat a customer can purchase at a given time.

“Costco has implemented limits on certain items to help ensure more members are able to purchase merchandise they want and need,” reads a company statement issued on Monday. “Our buyers and suppliers are working hard to provide essential, high demand merchandise as well as everyday favorites.”

The Seattle-based retailer said that fresh meat purchases are limited to three items per customer. That includes beef, pork, and poultry products.

It comes as grocery giant Kroger announced it has purchase limits on ground beef and fresh pork. New York-based Wegmans has also set limits on family packs for ground beef and some chicken breasts.

Last week, McDonald’s confirmed to news outlets it is changing a policy on how its restaurants get their supply of pork and beef amid meat shortages caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus pandemic.

The changes have been implemented as producers warned that there might be a U.S.-wide shortage of meat as workers get infected by the CCP virus, a novel coronavirus that emerged in China last year. Some plants have been forced to shut down.

“As pork, beef and chicken plants are being forced to close, even for short periods of time, millions of pounds of meat will disappear from the supply chain,” Tyson Foods chairman John Tyson warned in an open letter last week. “As a result, there will be limited supply of our products available in grocery stores until we are able to reopen our facilities that are currently closed.”

The threat of a meat shortage pushed President Donald Trump to invoke the Defense Production Act to order meat processing plants to stay open last week.