Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets. Joanna Blythman
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being tactically located by the entrance to create the impression of a store bursting with healthy fresh produce, increasingly occupy less gondola (shelf) space than ready meals, crisps, snacks or fizzy drinks. In other words, the selection you see pushes you towards processed food and makes you feel less inclined to cook. In this respect, UK supermarkets are strikingly different from European ones. Phil Daoust, a writer who moved from London to Alsace, summed up the difference in the Guardian. ‘The other morning I went to the supermarket without any clear idea of what I was going to buy. In Britain I would have come away with some sort of pasta bake, a pork pie, perhaps a Thai-style stir fry. I left the Intermarché with potatoes, lamb’s lettuce, steaks and wine. That night my daughter and I ate steak au poivre, garlic mash and salad with a light vinaigrette.’ In Britain, fewer and fewer people cook, microwaves are being installed rather than ovens and some homes don’t have a table on which to eat any more. More people are going for the easy option, which contributes to them getting fatter and less healthy, and they are strongly encouraged to do that by the supermarket system.
One fresh chilled food supplier observed wryly that UK supermarkets would stop selling fresh unprocessed food entirely if they thought they could get away with it. ‘Whether it’s melons, milk or mince, fresh unprocessed food is just full of hassle. It’s a pain in the butt. It doesn’t look nice, it’s inconsistent, it takes a lot of management by the store. If it stays an extra day or two in depot, they’ve lost it because it’s past its best. The less fresh food they can do the better as far as they are concerned. They stock it because they have to, because people expect it.’
Supermarkets feed this expectation with specialist counters – fresh meat and fish, delicatessen, ‘food to go’, hot pies, ‘curry pots’, hot carvery, salad bar, etc. These support the illusion that supermarkets offer all the fresh food virtues of the traditional, more personalised marketplace or vibrant high street, more conveniently organised under one roof. Morrisons prominently names the aisle with these sections as ‘Market Street’. In some newer stores, Sainsbury’s tries to create a market feel with an area dedicated to specialist counters at the front of the store. In supermarket language, such counters are ‘hero departments’ because they have ‘pulling power’. They bring people into the store and create an excitement that aisle after aisle of standard grocery products can’t. They add ‘theatre’ or excitement to the supermarket shopping experience.
Some of these specialist counters are more convincing than others. Morrisons, for example, has staff in each store who make up salads daily for self-service salad bars. Asda, on the other hand, has counters which promise that pizza is ‘Freshly Made For You’, but in the Asda store I visited, ‘freshly made’ consisted of putting prepared toppings (chopped ham, grated cheese, pepperoni) on top of ready-made pizza bases, then shrink wrapping them. At one Safeway pizzeria counter I visited, the pizza oven had a log-effect oven which, to the casual passer-by, gave the impression of a traditional wood-fired oven. Staff behind the counter told me that although the dough could be rolled out into one of two sizes on the spot, it was not made on the premises.
Produce sections also provide supermarkets with an opportunity to create a healthy image and create a mini-high street feel. Launching Sainsbury’s 2003 ‘First For Fresh’ – a major overhaul of its produce presentation – the chain’s project manager explained that it was about ‘re-emphasising our excellence in fresh food to the consumer’. When customers first came in they would see ‘abundant displays, merchandised with a lot of flair, using colours and varieties to best effect’, she said, adding that blackboard-type signage would give it a ‘traditional greengrocer feel’.
But even on the produce shelves it is obvious that supermarkets want to sell us processed food. Sainsbury’s, for example, has a Food To Go line called ‘Fully Prepared Apple Bites’ which consists of apple slices dipped in a vitamin C solution and then placed in a ‘pillow pack’ filled with modified air to stop them going brown. They cost twice the price of an apple. Yet as Brian Logan reflected in the Guardian, the apple in its intact form is the original convenience food, a natural ‘food to go’ with its own edible packaging, perfect for those age-old apple dissecting devices with which we are all equipped, teeth.
Farcical though ‘Fully Prepared Apple Bites’ might seem, the business logic behind this is simple. There is a limit to what you can charge for straightforward unprocessed ingredients. But add value to them through some sort of food processing, then package them appealingly, and the sky is the limit. There’s only so much you can ask, after all, for a kilo of potatoes, no matter how esoteric the variety or well scrubbed the spud. Overdo your margin, and you get the reputation for being a rapacious retailer. But sell those potatoes as a ‘just reheat’ gratin, or a microwavable potato croquette, and you’ll be quids in, with the added bonus that the costing behind the price will be less transparent to customers than it would be with unprocessed food. Provided the ‘pick-up’ price is attractive, most people will not have any idea whether value-added food represents true value for money. One meat supplier told me: ‘They [supermarkets] constantly encourage us to come up with processed food convenience lines on which they can make better margins. They only make about 10 per cent on fresh meat but they need at least 20 per cent to cover their costs. That’s why so little promotional activity is around fresh meat. But they have to stock it because it’s a “must-have”. On processed meat products, they can make as much as a 43 per cent margin and that’s why they like to sell them.’
Supermarkets’ fondness for processing food in some way so as to add value and make more money is bad news for our health. In 2004, Which? Magazine found that processed fruit and vegetables in supermarkets – such as prepared Brussels sprouts, broccoli florets and melon slices – had seriously depleted levels of vitamin C, the most striking example being a bag of Asda sliced runner beans which contained 89 per cent less vitamin C than the typical textbook runner bean.
There is also another reason why supermarkets load their offer with processed food. Mass-produced food that can be churned out over and over again in vast, uniform quantities, made by a handful of big manufacturers who jump to the big retailers’ tune, processed food lends itself to supermarket retailing: it gives them the ability to put a standard, regular product into every store nationwide, a product that doesn’t require any on-the-spot specialist handling. Big Food and Big Retail are two sides of the same coin. Industrial food lends itself to the supermarkets’ heavily centralised, highly mechanical distribution systems, but fresh raw ingredients don’t. Unlike cat food and rice crispies, they are irritatingly subject to the vagaries of nature. Apples don’t all grow on a tree to the same size to conveniently fit into moulded polystyrene packs of four. A herd of cattle won’t all obligingly provide steaks of uniform dimension. Some stubborn types of fruits and vegetables simply cannot be made to grow all year round, however much that would suit supermarket systems. All the plaice that might be fished in the waters around the UK is not conveniently landed at one harbour so that supermarkets can instruct a favoured supplier to buy them all up.
In other words, because fresh raw ingredients are a natural, rather than industrial product, they require more specific, less uniform sourcing and more knowledgeable, experienced and flexible handling than is the supermarket norm. Because of their retailing power, we might assume that supermarkets would handle such perishable cargo in an infinitely more sophisticated and more expert manner than the independent fishmongers, butchers, cheesemongers and greengrocers they put out of business. The irony is that despite the apparently intricate technological infrastructure that supports supermarket food retailing – all those refrigerated lorries pounding up and down the motorway, all those jets transporting food from the other side of the world in a matter of hours, those comprehensive logistics imposed on suppliers in the name of consumer demand – supermarkets have not proved to be supreme champions at delivering fresh and varied food in peak condition. Although supermarkets may be efficient enough at shipping