Forecasting the Demand of Honey Product for Facing Panic Buying and Stockpile in Pandemics

Abstract

The threat on health sector has massive impacts, and one of them is on business internal management as the main factor of producers to consider design of their products. During pandemic, honey is categorized as food supplement. In a certain phase, when the demand upon honey is high, the price tends to be unstable due to an imbalance between supply and demand. Complexities of consumer during pandemics effect on food security system. Unpreparedness of the producers in facing the phenomenon of panic buying and stockpile causes scarcity. Objective of the research was forecasting the demand of honey following the second pandemic wave and supported SMEs to create adaptive strategy to face scarcity. Method of the research used secondary data and survey in the field, which was ended by FGD to decide strategy of the producer to minimize scarcity. Data analysis used MSE (Mean Squared Error) with exponential smoothing. Results of the research showed that the method of alpha exponential 5% has minimum error, which forecast that in December 2021, the demand of propolis honey may reduce after the 2nd wave of Covid in Indonesia and approach to normal forecasting system. The accuracy with exponential method is higher and may facilitate the producers to provide products when fear contagion and panic buying take place. Contribution of analysis result toward strategy of the producers is providing estimation that maximum amount of availability increases no more than 2 times of the real demand of the consumers when panic buying occurs. The most needed strategy is setting the timeline in the projection of consumer journey. This alternative is relevant to fear contagion phenomenon because it contributes to socio-psychology of the consumers in deciding to buy supplement of honey product. Novelty of this research is examining the frequency wave of product purchase intensity of the consumer journey with Covid-19 phenomenon.