Americans are returning to restaurants, bars and other dining places as Covid-19 restrictions come down, adding new strains in food supply chains.

Suppliers and logistics providers say distributors are facing shortages of everyday products like chicken parts, as well as difficulty in finding workers and surging transportation costs as companies effectively try to reverse the big changes in food services that came as coronavirus lockdowns spread across the U.S. last year.

"Over the last six weeks, we have seen the market come roaring back faster than anybody would have anticipated," said Mark Allen, chief executive of the International Foodservice Distributors Association. "The start up has been, in many ways, as difficult as the shutdown…Everybody is trying to turn it on immediately and the capacity might not be there."

Kerry Byrne, president of Total Quality Logistics LLC, a Cincinnati-based freight broker with a large portfolio of business serving food-processing companies and distributors, said shortages of raw materials are leading to erratic deliveries of items that usually arrive on predictable schedules. "That disrupts entire supply chains. Everything is stressed," he said.