Starting this month, food retailers across Britain face a new set of rules to ensure that pricing information is presented without exaggeration or distortion. This has been a running battle for trading standards officers for years, since supermarkets started tweaking their shelf displays to give them a stronger margin on own label products, leaving brands that already pay thousands of pounds every year in shelf money have to make do with low visibility facings and lost sales.
There is nothing new in this long-running argument, which has been running for about 15 years and was one of the reasons why the Grocery Commissioner was appointed in a bid to bring some order to the industry. Beter luck next time…