Severe shortages continue at Coles supermarkets across the state

Coles shelves have been stripped bare of fresh produce and dairy at a number of stores across the state.

3AW listeners have reported severe shortages at stores in Brunswick East, Torquay, Malvern and Pakenham.

Coles CEO Matt Swindells said the shortages are due to the lingering impact of a COVID-19 cluster at the supermarket’s Laverton distribution centre last week.

“We’ve had a few challenges over the past 7 days. Due to the incident at Laverton we had a shortfall in the volume that we could push through that site,” he told Neil Mitchell.

“There’s 219 stores that get serviced out of Laverton so it’s quite a complex operation to recover all of that stock back.”

But Mr Swindells said stock shortages are expected to improve by the end of the week.

“We were operating around about 15 per cent … that’s back to about 40 per cent today and we expect that to get back to around 100 per cent by Thursday,” he said.

“It will get better.”

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In more positive news, Coles last night removed item limits after signs of a second wave of panic buying subsided.

Woolworths has also removed item limits on all products except for toilet paper.