one chain’s offering had some slight merit over another’s, Mr Hom sounded distinctly underwhelmed. One tasted ‘more like an airline meal’; another was ‘not green curry as I know it’. The highest score went to ‘the best of the bunch’. One sensed that given a free hand, he might have been happier offering a Eurovision Song Contest ‘nul points’ to the whole lot.
The fact that one chain’s Thai green curry tastes pretty much like all the others – and not at all like any green curry you’d ever encounter in Thailand – is scarcely surprising. There’s a good chance that it was made by the same company that is supplying its rivals. Between 1995 and 2000, for example, Hazlewood Foods was a major chilled meals supplier to Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose and Morrisons; S&A to Tesco, Safeway and Asda; Northern Foods to Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s and Tesco; Geest to Sainsbury’s and Tesco; and Noon to Sainsbury’s and Waitrose. Another company, Uniq, has worked with various chains developing their low-fat, healthy-eating product ranges such as Marks & Spencer’s Count On Us, Sainsbury’s Be Good To Yourself, Safeway’s Eat Smart and Asda’s Good For You ranges.
Of course one cannot automatically assume, because of this clubby overlap, that supermarkets can’t instruct their faithful suppliers to introduce a genuine ‘point of difference’ to distinguish their chain’s offering from all the others. Recipes may differ, ingredients may come from distinct sources and so on. But taste your way around a few supermarket chilled meals and you will begin to notice how the white sauce in one chain’s cod and parsley pie is surprisingly like another chain’s moussaka topping, how the tomato goo on top of your pizza tastes oddly reminiscent of the Mediterranean-style pasta in tomato and basil sauce, how the Mexican salsa tastes like the Spanish gazpacho and how, if you sampled the sauce on those Malaysian sweet chilli prawns blind, you might easily confuse it with the gravy on the lamb steak with redcurrants.
Think about it a little longer and you’ll pick up the same defining characteristics in almost all savoury supermarket-prepared meals. Any meat will probably be overcooked and dry – a consequence of bulk factory cooking followed by domestic reheating. A salty savouriness without any particular flavour profile prevails. Where a sauce or a liquid element is present, a gloopy consistency is de rigueur. Last but not least, don’t be surprised it looks little like the picture on the box. That enticing image, after all, is the product of long hours of toil put in by a team of food stylists, lighting managers and photographers.
Clearly, when so much food is made for our supermarkets by the same companies, the results are likely to resemble one another. The same state-of-the-art factory line technologies and automated short cuts are used to turn out any mass-produced food object. Any slight personality to be found in the ingredients used is beaten out of them by the time they have been subjected to the various interventions of large-scale food processing. Hence the institutionalised sameness of supermarket ready meals.
Lest consumers begin to tire of this uniformity, supermarkets go in for what is known as ‘sub-branding’ or ‘segmentation’. When their shoppers begin to feel like children at Christmas, rather jaded with that new toy, supermarkets like to feed us a stream of novelties that appear to refresh the category even though they are essentially variations of the same thing. It’s just like Barbie, the doll with the abundant hair, pert breasts, long legs and impossibly narrow hips. There is Beach Barbie, Air Hostess Barbie, Aerobic Barbie and so on but she always has the same essential hair, breasts, legs and hips. Supermarket ready meals are the food equivalent: they might as well be Thai Barbie, Bistro Barbie, Café Society Barbie, Vegetarian Barbie or Indian Takeaway Barbie. They look superficially different but the underlying prototype remains the same. The resemblance stops there though because most supermarket ready meals don’t, like Barbie, still look good when they come out of their packaging. They look like what they are, a disappointingly slight, unappetising-looking pile of overcooked food in a plastic tray.
Any positive selling point or new-sounding concept can, in supermarket-speak, be ‘rolled out’ into stores to create a new range. Better-than-the-rest ranges (such as Tesco Finest or Asda’s Extra Special, Somerfield’s So Good, Co-op’s Truly Irresistible), Ready-To-Cook, Meals in Minutes, lines that promote healthy eating or cater for special dietary needs like Sainsbury’s Wellbeing or Safeway’s Eat Smart, a celebrity chef collection perhaps, a ‘value’ range are all concepts that allow the creation of whole new family groups or tiers of products, as desirable and collectable to trusting consumers as Pokemon cards and football stickers. These ranges boost the own-brand power of the chain by increasing the number of ‘facings’ with which shelves can be filled, preventing ennui from setting in and customers from drifting elsewhere.
Just as we are beginning to notice that our supermarket’s chicken korma, for example, is expensive for what it is, not to mention pretty dull, the chain will relaunch it in a new, exciting Regional Indian format, only tweaking the product itself but radically altering its appearance and the marketing pitch on the box. These supermarket strategies encourage us to see diversity and qualitative difference where in fact there is pitifully little. With only minor adjustments, factory spaghetti bolognese can be reinvented as spicy Manhattan meatballs with spaghetti. A change of packaging and hey presto, chilli con carne becomes a chilli beef bowl. A few standard dishes, minimally altered then packed in a brown craft paper takeaway bag, can become a restaurant ‘Chinese banquet’. Unable or unwilling to give us the true variety that comes from using a large number of suppliers with geographically distinctive, often seasonal foods, produced with specialist expertise, supermarkets offer instead the phoney choice of the merchandised factory meal in its seemingly infinite chameleon-like forms.
Sainsbury’s summed up UK supermarket chains’ claims to broaden the British palate when it said that it could supply ‘everything you need to launch you on a round-the-world voyage of culinary discovery’. This thinking produces some very bizarre products: Sainsbury’s ‘American style mini battered chicken fillets with a honey and mustard sauce’, for example. These look and taste indistinguishable from any number of other battered chicken products on supermarket shelves. It is not at all clear what is American about them. Their label, though, says ‘Produced in Thailand … This product has been previously frozen and defrosted under controlled conditions making it suitable for refreezing.’ So there you have it, an unremarkable bit of battered chicken reared and manufactured in Asia (where chicken is produced for less than the UK) to a nominally American recipe, which is then sent frozen from the other side of the world to be defrosted in the UK so you can refreeze it at home. Is this a globetrotting foodie adventure worth having?
With such creations, far from broadening the UK’s palate, supermarkets have conditioned it to accept traducements of the real thing. Italian chef and food expert Antonio Carluccio has been outspoken about their contribution to Britain’s food education. ‘Supermarkets have committed huge crimes when it comes to Italian food. It’s everyone’s dream to supply Tesco or Sainsbury, but I would say to many small suppliers, don’t bother. The supermarkets here have such a large share of the market that you have to be able to supply large volumes and quality is compromised. I was once invited by a major food supplier to multiples to improve the own-label lasagne. But when they went back to the supermarkets they weren’t interested because it was 10 pence dearer.’
Supermarket convenience foods flirt with foreignness, exoticism and authenticity, but their taste remains essentially conservative, upholding the salty-sweet, gloopy status quo of industrial food production. As Safeway’s buying manager for prepared foods put it, ‘Authenticity is not necessarily what people want, so we try to marry authenticity with the British palate.’ The truth is that supermarket prepared food can’t be made to taste like a good example of the real thing, and so supermarkets must feed a dumbed-down version to the consumers with a positive spin put on it. They have
