As I write this, the world’s chokepoints are in the headlines. The Strait of Hormuz, through which a significant share of our region’s seaborne trade passes, sits under renewed strategic stress. Its closure and sustained restriction have forced re-routing, longer transit, alternative destination ports, and substitute suppliers across the foodservice industry. For our industry, this is not only a logistics story. It is a hygiene story. 

When a shipment leaves the US East Coast, the US West Coast or Rotterdam and is re-routed around the Cape of Good Hope, off-loaded at Fujairah, Khor Fakkan, Sohar, Salalah or Jeddah, or trucked across borders, every additional hour in transit is an hour the cold chain must hold. Every substitute supplier must be re-qualified and approved for meeting specifications and quality standards. Every alternate origin brings a different food-safety regime into our kitchens. The risk surface expands quietly while the headlines focus on freight rates and insurance premiums. 

Food Hygiene: A Critical Factor 

At PJP, we operate Papa Johns restaurants across the UAE, KSA, Jordan, and through a JV in India. Our position is unambiguous, and I have asked every leader in our system to repeat it. Hygiene is the standard that should never be substituted. Suppliers can change. Routes can change. Costs can move. The protein, the dairy, the produce, and the packaging that touch a customer’s food must meet the standard, every time, regardless of how the cargo arrived. At Papa Johns, the standards governing our core gold-standard products are stringent by design, which makes avoiding stock-outs a real challenge in this environment, and one we accept. 

Holding that line in volatile periods is not a paperwork exercise. It is a culture. 

Paperwork Vs Culture 

Paperwork tells your team what to check. Culture tells your team what to refuse. The most important hygiene control in any restaurant is a frontline manager who is trained, trusted, and empowered to reject an inbound delivery that does not meet specification, even when the alternative is an empty shelf. That decision must be backed by the leadership, not punished by it. We invest in this with deliberate intent: training that is repeated, audits that are independent, supplier qualification that is paranoid by design, and cold-chain verification that does not rely on a single point of failure. When disruption arrives, we do not lower the bar. We work harder to find supply that meets the bar, and where we cannot, we take the item off the menu before we take chances with the customer. 

This is the operator’s responsibility. It is also an industry responsibility. 

In my role at the UAE Restaurants Group, I see a sector that has matured rapidly, yet our collective crisis sourcing playbook has not matured at the same pace. A Strait of Hormuz event, or a parallel Red Sea closure, will not respect the boundaries between operators. We will all reach for the same alternative origins, the same trans-shipment hubs, the same set of feeder vessels, and the same emergency suppliers. Without shared standards, we will quietly import variability into the regional food-safety baseline at exactly the moment we can least afford it. 

Three Point Action 

I would urge three actions across our industry. First, agree a shared minimum specification for crisis-sourced inputs, so that operators of every size can substitute without compromising safety. Second, pre-qualify alternate origin countries and trans-shipment routes collectively, in partnership with our regulators, before we need them. Third, treat traceability as a public good, not a competitive advantage. 

Customer trust is the most portable asset our industry holds. It survives cost shocks, route closures, and political turbulence. It does not survive a single avoidable food-safety failure. The map will keep changing. The standard cannot.