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 commodities like tinned tomatoes and toilet roll around the country, when it comes to that critical fresh department, their goals and systems actually get in the way of doing a good job.
11 Permanent global summertime
A Briton born a hundred years ago, resurrected and propelled around the typical modern supermarket, would be astounded at the staggering choice that’s on offer. Entering via the fruit and vegetable aisle, he or she might even conclude that his children’s children live in a latter-day Garden of Eden. How else would you explain that eye-catching cornucopia? Modern consumers who actually eat the stuff, however, are less impressed.
In 2002, an article I wrote for the Guardian ‘Weekend’ entitled ‘Strange Fruit’, attacking the quality of supermarket fruit and vegetables, received an unusually large, impassioned and supportive postbag. One Cambridgeshire reader wrote in referring to the ‘gastronomical tyranny’ of the supermarket fruit and vegetable shelves. ‘The supermarkets’ dumbing down of our taste experience isn’t just confined to selecting varieties with longest shelf life and least flavour,’ he continued and went on to relate a personal taste experiment. ‘Last week I compared a Victoria plum from our garden with one bought from Sainsbury’s. One was full of flavour and a succulent mouthful, the other tasteless pap. You can guess which was which,’ he wrote. A reader from Gloucestershire yearned for produce that ‘tasted good as well as looked good’. A London reader was angered by a supermarket spokesman quoted in the article who had insisted that consumers were happy with their offering. ‘He needs to know,’ she wrote, ‘that people are not happy with what they are getting and that we don’t want “freshly prepared lines to fit modern lifestyles”. We want seasonal produce with flavour. It’s time to boycott supermarket produce and refamiliarise ourselves with our local greengrocers,’ she concluded.
Increasingly, people have become disenchanted with supermarket produce. One reason is that it is predicated on a new nature-defying order where every conceivable fruit and vegetable grown anywhere is available all the time. I named it ‘permanent global summertime’ (PGST). Supermarkets’ pursuit of PGST means that they cannot be open with customers. In January, for example, a knowledgeable greengrocer would know that there are no peaches to be had anywhere in the world that are worth eating by the time they arrive in the UK and would simply stop stocking them. In May, confronted with a customer seeking parsnips, he might gently suggest that they were out of season and suggest a more appropriate alternative. But supermarkets don’t have this option because such candour would give the lie to the dream they peddle in which it is both feasible, and indeed reasonable, for the UK shopper to expect virtually every horticultural product on the planet every day.
Supermarkets promote this artificial reality because they know that fruit and vegetables are a ‘destination category’: in other words, they form an initial impression that can clinch a consumer’s choice of store or might even persuade them to switch stores. The produce section is attractive window dressing for everything else from washing powder to custard creams. It gives chains an opportunity to differentiate themselves from one another. If you have a fruit or vegetable ‘exclusive’, your whole chain seems more interesting to the consumer. The more unusual or rare, the more environmentally right-on, the better. As a Sainsbury’s buyer pointed out, ‘Adams Pearmain [a traditional English apple variety] offers a genuine point of difference.’
