Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

retail
Every little hurts…
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European food retailer Tesco has group sales of more than GBP 50 billion and saw its profitability soar by nearly 60%. The group is active in eastern Europe as well as the UK, where it operates convenience buying group and wholesaler Booker foods in addition to the ubiquitous supermarkets. Here are a few headline figures from its annual report.

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To give an idea of the scale of these results, the 2021 GDP of Rwanda was 11.7 billion USD.

Tesco financial 2022 results are available at https://www.tescoplc.com/investors/reports-results-and-presentations/annual-report-2022/, the Rwanda GDP figure supplied by Google based on World Bank data.

canning food manufacture
Fighting brands
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With household budgets increasingly under pressure, cheaper options are under constant review. There is a case to be made for arguing that the fixed costs of running a canning line or a filling line is much the same regardless of the price of the finished product. But the variations that can arise from the quality of the ingredients remain significant.

Sometime referred to as “fighting brands”, cheap canned goods with obscure branding are planned into quiet moments of the production schedule, taking up the slack towards the end of a tomato season, for instance. Recognisable from their lightweight tinplate-lined cans, the fighting brands are very unlikely to be fitted with ring pulls.

Branded goods are judged on the quality of the finished product, for which we expect to pay more. Fighting brands will find ways of extending the product, which represents a greater share of the final price. 

retail
Eustice shopping tips
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George Eustice (photo: UK parliament/free to use)

When trying to save money while shopping for food, stating the blindingly obvious is not going to go down well. Food and farming minister George Eustice (pictured) take note. For those who frequent the supermarket aisles at regular intervals, there is no need for well-paid MPs to chip in with their two pennyworth, as reported in The Guardian this week.
Supermarket shelves are laid out to make it easy to spot cheap products, so advising shoppers to consider cheaper fighting brands is unnecessary. Just saying that simply trading down will enable shoppers to “…contain and manage their household budget…” is rubbing salt into the wounds.
Possibly more damaging to his ministerial credibility was Eustice’s assertion that the UK has a “…very competitive retail market with 10 big supermarkets…” resulting in “…a lot of competition to keep prices down.” Since all retailers face open-ended rises in energy and haulage costs, food is not about to get any cheaper. And that is before phasing in veterinary certificates and the cost of food safety checks on imported animal products.