These items are moving through the supply chain, but cannot reach the stores quickly enough so retailers have asked suppliers to produce more.

But even as farmers and slaughterhouses ramp up, producing food takes time. In the poultry industry, it takes about three weeks for a chicken egg to incubate and hatch, and then five to six weeks for the bird to grow to maturity. For some chicken suppliers, the process takes even longer, depending on the type of bird.

Across the industry, it takes about 60 days to get a chicken to a customer, said Matthew Wadiak, who runs Cooks Venture, a chicken supplier based in Arkansas and Oklahoma. Sixty days ago, “we didn’t know this was even on the horizon,” he added. “There was essentially no way to plan for it.”

Mr. Wadiak said some of Cooks Venture’s customers — like the Berkeley Bowl grocery stores in California — had quadrupled their orders in recent days.

“People are very short today. Retailers are short on products,” Mr. Wadiak said. “So we’re helping out where we can, and I know that we’re not meeting the full demand.”

It’s clear that the modern supply chain, for all its efficiency and speed, is not equipped to deal with this kind of surge.

Algorithms, perfected by Amazon, can pinpoint exactly how much inventory a warehouse or particular store must keep on hand during a typical week, right down to the soup can. But no algorithm could predict this extraordinary moment, leading to widespread out-of-stocks of hundreds of household necessities.