Back on February 2, the first coronavirus death outside China was reported in the Philippines. That same day, Donald Trump appeared on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News to say that the United States had “pretty much shut it down coming in from China.” And in San Antonio, Justen Noakes, the director of emergency preparedness for H-E-B, dusted off a pandemic response plan the supermarket chain had developed more than a decade earlier. Noakes and a handful of the company’s department heads met at H-E-B’s downtown headquarters. Sitting around a conference table, the group ran a simulation, war-gaming a dire scenario: an outbreak of a deadly infectious disease in Texas.
“We introduced the concept of COVID-19 and what it would look like when it came to Texas,” Noakes said. “That gave us a moment to pause to think about how it would impact our operations and what we would do to respond.” From there, teams across H-E-B got to work updating the pandemic plan that Noakes had developed in 2009, when the San Antonio suburb of Cibolo became the first place in Texas with confirmed cases of H1N1, commonly known as swine flu. The emergency management division studied how the Chinese government had responded in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak and projected how social distancing measures such as metering customer entry and erecting plexiglass partitions might be implemented. Members of the supply-chain team focused on keeping products in stock. The personnel department studied how Chinese retailers were managing a workforce that was getting sick. The product team looked to Europe for insight into changes in consumer behavior as customers began self-isolating. Within a couple weeks of the tabletop exercise, H-E-B had a plan.
A month later, in mid-March, as the pandemic began to surge in the United States and political leaders struggled to respond, H-E-B emerged as an unlikely model of foresight, planning, and competence. Executives cut store hours in order to give employees more time to stock shelves, and rolled out a pay bump of $2 an hour, which gave way to permanent raises for most hourly employees in June. Purchase limits were imposed on in-demand products ranging from beef to toilet paper. The company established crowd control and social distancing procedures and tapped partners in other industries—such as restaurant suppliers and beer distributors—to haul products to its stores to avoid shortages. These steps often came days or even weeks before other large supermarket chains implemented similar measures. After Texas Monthly published a web story in March on H-E-B’s pandemic planning, Arnold Schwarzenegger tweeted that the company’s response was “a masterclass in preparation and being ready to support your community.”
H-E-B’s success stands in contrast to the way the Trump administration and some state governments have handled the pandemic. Americans struggled to get tests and spent much of March and April trying to parse rambling, often contradictory presidential press conferences for official updates about the disease; H-E-B, which employs a chief medical officer, rolled out a dedicated coronavirus hotline its workers could call for screenings and health information. Coronavirus swept through meatpacking plants across the nation, including in Texas, this spring and summer; H-E-B, which operates its own meatpacking facilities, applied the same social distancing protocols it implemented in stores and avoided a single case for nearly three months, even as production ramped up to a 24/7 cycle to meet the needs of customers. (An H-E-B spokesperson acknowledged that some workers tested positive in June and July but wouldn’t give a precise number, adding that none of the infections have been linked to the plants.) All of which led to questions: How had Texas’s favorite grocery chain, beloved for its deep bench of house brands and commemorative Selena tote bags, emerged as an example of planning and readiness? How was a regional supermarket company better prepared for a global pandemic than its larger competitors and even the federal government?
From left, Quincy Quarles, the director of corporate security, Joaquin Jaimes, the risk solutions safety supervisor, and Justen Noakes, the director of emergency preparedness, at the Emergency Operations Center, in San Antonio.
Photograph by Tamir Kalifa
In 2017, as Hurricane Harvey ravaged the Gulf Coast, the city of Beaumont lost water pressure, leaving residents with empty taps as floodwaters rose around them. City officials called on the state to help restore service but were told that assistance wasn’t immediately coming. Officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, meanwhile, explained that it would take days to get past the flooding. That was when Noakes got a call from someone working for the city. “He said, ‘I know that I’m asking a lot, but what can H-E-B do to get water to the citizens of Beaumont?’ ” Noakes recalled. Soon, images of H-E-B semitrucks hauling tanks of water into storm-ravaged Beaumont went viral on social media, and H-E-B’s disaster response became a meme among Gulf Coast residents. “I’ll see your FEMA and Red Cross,” one declared, “and raise you my Texas grocery store.”
H-E-B had begun developing a deeper understanding of the role it could play as an emergency responder in 2005, after Hurricane Rita struck southeast Texas, said Noakes, who has been with the company since 1994. “We learned early on after Hurricane Rita that power is very important to keeping H-E-B stores running,” he said. So the company increased its fleet of mobile generators. Flooding taught the company about the importance of having potable water sources—hence the water tankers. Noakes took on his current role as director of emergency preparedness in 2008, watching for hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, and other potential disasters in Texas. “When you feed half the people in Texas, it’s your responsibility to be open during times of crisis,” Noakes said.
In 2017, following Hurricane Irma, H-E-B partnered with San Antonio Spurs legend Tim Duncan to deliver 400,000 pounds of food to the Virgin Islands, where the NBA star was born. Last fall, after tornadoes swept across Dallas, leaving a fifteen-mile trail of destruction in their wake, the company sent its mobile kitchen to the city to feed storm victims.
“We are in a year-round state of preparedness for different emergencies,” H-E-B president Craig Boyan said. It helps that the company has an emergency preparedness department, he noted: if you’re constantly thinking about those things, you’re more likely to be able to address them.
“Almost everything they do is proprietary to H-E-B,” said Jon Springer, the executive editor of the supermarket trade publication Winsight Grocery Business. “So when a situation like the coronavirus comes up, they’re better able to use their own resources, data, and people to coordinate a response than someone who is relying on what the federal government is telling them.”
That internal planning has manifested itself in specific ways during the pandemic. “Manufacturing so much of what we sell has been a real source of strength, as we’ve been able to serve our customers in ways that other competitors maybe haven’t been able to do,” said Martin Otto, H-E-B’s chief operating officer. By running its own meatpacking plants, for example, the company has been able to avoid the shortages that some other grocers have faced.
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