Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

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Europe food manufacture haulage retail Switzerland

Migros marks major milestone

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Swiss retail giant Migros has achieved the first stage of its 2030 carbon neutrality plan. All the multiple’s retail premises have completed their transition to become carbon neutral.

As the country’s largest food business and retailer, Migros operates the lion’s share of the national retail park. It has been a dominant force on the national retail scene for decades.

Between now and 2030, Migros will cut a further 80% of its greenhouse gas emissions from its business activities, including its extensive food manufacturing arm.

Instead of buying carbon credits to offset its remaining environmental overheads, Migros will “inset” its remaining emissions. One example of this arrangement is a project working with 1,000 Thai peasant families to raise the environmental standards of their rice growing. For instance, there are gains to be made by not flooding paddy fields, which area significant source of methane emissions. The result is a contribution towards a potential reduction of  60% in  the crop’s carbon footprint worldwide.

livestock pigs UK

British pigs start 2022 with record average carcase weight

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As overcrowded pig farms send their first lorryloads of slaughter pigs to the abattoirs, AHDB is reporting an all-time high of 94.12 kg for the national average carcase weight. As if proof of poor conformation was needed, back probe measurements averaged 11.8mm in the week ending January 1. Predictably, the percentage of pigs meeting the SPP specification has sagged to 84%, compared to a long term average of 93%. Without culling or moving thousands of pigs that have been contracted, but not taken by processors, the pig sector crisis will deepen: ignoring it will not solve anything.

AHDB pork data can be found here.

livestock pigs UK

Tesco makes pig harvest gaffe

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Tesco tweet bot “Kayley” upset UK pig farmers on January 5 by suggesting that British pork supply gaps were weather-related and that the retailer stocked pigmeat from a number of countries to ensure the best quality was always available. In the process the retailer coined the “pig harvest”, adding to the anger of pig producers all over the country. Read Alastair Driver’s account of this episode in Pig World.

https://www.pig-world.co.uk/news/poor-weather-hits-pig-harvest-tesco-explains-lack-of-british-pork-of-shelves.html

Europe fruit Switzerland

Longer shelf life for fresh produce

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Swiss researchers have found a way of using fruit and vegetable peelings to make a coating that extends the shelf life of fresh produce. Staff at the Empa research body have been working with Lidl Switzerland since 2019 to develop what promises to be a game changer.

Bananas have been chosen to test Empa’s cellulose coating.

Testing the coating on bananas, a gain of up to a week was recorded in the product life. There is the added benefit that with a reduction in the use plastic materials, the risk of condensation or rot in transit is also lower. “The big goal is that such bio-coatings will be able to replace a lot of petroleum-based packaging in the future,” explains Gustav Nyström, head of the Empa lab.

Lidl Switzerland has 150 stores that will take part in testing the new coating as it continues its development over the next two years.

Further details from the Empa website.

Europe France retail

Knock, knock…

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The French finance ministry announced the other week that it had raided a number of multiple food retailer head  offices and some of their suppliers. In a terse staement dated November 9, the competition authority warned that it is not going to identify the retailers concerned and will not risk compromising the investigation.

In similar raids in the past, inspectors of the Direction Générale de la Concurrence, de la Consommation et de la Répression des Fraudes (DGCCRF) have carried out raids without warning and gathered thousands of invoices and other documents within 12 hours. Known as the “répression des fraudes” the DGCCRF has a justified reputation for being ruthlessly efficient.

Europe retail Switzerland

P… R… no Q!

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Switzerland’s biggest retail cooperative, Migros, is eliminating supermarket checkout queues. Customers using the Migros “subitoGo” application can scan their purchases on their smartphone and leave the store without further ado.

The system will be tried out at 80 outlets and rolled out if it proves successful. The software also links into any shopping list that might have been prepared before leaving home; fewer chances of leaving the store without a full complement of shopping.  SubitoGo combines the Italian word for suddenly and Go.

Europe fish France sardine

What Mona Lisa tells us about sardines

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Sardines in the Mediterranean are now smaller and lighter than 20 years ago.  Mona Lisa is a European project which has been studying sardine populations in the region and has established that the average lengths of sardines had fallen from 15 centimetres to 11 and the average weight has nosedived from 30 grams to 10.

Researchers attribute the dramatic decline to a 15% drop in stocks of micro-algae in the bay of Biscay, which has lowered the nutritional value of plankton. The study carried out by the French marine institute Ifremer was able to rule out overfishing and natural predators such as dolphins or tuna. It also established that there was no virus to blame for the dramatic decline.

The  changing composition of plankton was investigated using a controlled sardine population  of 450 fish divided into four groups and fed differing strengths of plankton. This is the largest project of its kind anywhere in the world.

The sardine is one of the most heavily fished species in the world. The high demand from canneries creates a commercial value for sardines within a certain size range. Changing the size of sardine cans would entail substantial costs for retooling packing lines, not to mention major revisions to packing and cooking protocols for the autoclaves.

France retail

Four percent is history

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Within living memory, a grocery business was considered successful if it earned a margin of three or four percent, but in the late 20th century supermarkets rewrote the rules.

Grocery multiples expect suppliers to have deep pockets and fund special offers at the drop of a hat.

Call it shelf money; marketing assistance; listing fees, the multiples started asking for — and getting — sums in the order of GBP 5000 a year per Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) for listing a product in an agreed number of stores (usually hundreds). Bearing in mind that a large supermarket will stock about 20,000 SKUs, some of which will be furnished by more than one supplier, the country’s major multiples are trousering millions in readies up front, without giving suppliers so much as a cat in hell’s chance of their money back if an SKU is delisted.

There are many ways the multiples can extract whatever money they feel a supplier should cough up: withholding invoice settlements; requiring suppliers to pay for Point Of Sale promotional material; special offers (these are always funded by the supplier); the list is a long one.


So the grocer that used to eke out resources to earn three or four percent has been consigned to history. France’s biggest retailer, Michel-Edouard Leclerc went on the record in October 2007 to say that a hypermarket needs to earn a margin of 25%. I saved the URL*, but Leclerc has deleted the blog post since then, leaving a rather fancy 404 page shown in the picture.

 * http://www.michel-edouard-leclerc.com/blog/m.e.l/archives/2007/10/index.php?date=20071025#000727

Denmark Europe plants

Hand to mouth

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Pic by Sven Rosborn: public domain.
Tollund man, photographed in 1950 by Sven Rosborn. Public domain.

Meet Tollund man, whose body was recovered from a peat bog in Denmark in 1950. His face is one of a handful to have survived down the centuries from an age when finding food in Europe was a constant struggle. The cadaver was so well preserved in the sphagnum moss that scientists have had an opportunity to investigate Tollund man’s last meal.

This was a rough gruel made from seeds and grain, including barley, flax and common knotweed. There is no way of knowing whether Tollund man ate as frequently as once a day, but every last morsel of food came from his immediate surroundings.

There was no question of exotic or imported food reaching such a humble soul. This may strike us as strange since we live in a world where foods of all descriptions travel halfway round the world. We need to recognise that Tollund man had marginal existence rather than a sustainable diet. How he survived is a mystery to us in the twenty first century, but we are about to relearn the skill set or perish in the attempt. The plants Tollund man harvested can still be found at certain times during the year and these harvests will reclaim their relevance to our times, probably within our lifetimes.

We should not think of Tollund man as a survivor in a hostile environment that has long since been domesticated but recognise that this former denizen of the wild prehistoric lowlands has a lesson for us. Regardless of how he met his end, Tollund man lived by foraging and had skills that we are likely to need once more.