Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

cookery UK
The National Mark
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In 1934, the Ministry of Agriculture published a recipe collection based on ingredients produced to National Mark standards, a fundamentally flawed quality assurance scheme overseen by the ministry. In 1936, the ministry went on to publish a second National Mark booklet with a year’s worth of recipes and product information, couched in the most toe-curling and sexist language imaginable.

The National Mark Calendar of Cooking is a 128-page stapled booklet, published in 1936. It contained recipes compiled by cookery correspondent of the News Chronicle, Ambrose Heath and Good Housekeeping Institute director Mrs D D Cottington Taylor.

It addressed an affluent upper class readership, heaping unstinting praise on British-grown food and overlooking the fact that the UK depended — and still does in large measure — on imported food. As the rest of Europe prepared for war, the National Mark Calendar warbled and wittered on endlessly about products that were only available to a rich elite.

Recipes for June include such gems as semolina souflee and poached eggs in aspic.The souflee recipe gives instructions for cooking the dish in a hot oven or a steamer, should a suitable oven be unavailable.

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.

food production livestock plants vegetables
A broken system
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The Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs select committee (EFRA) has recently published its findings on staff shortages in the UK food industry. It frames the problem as half a million unfilled jobs in a sector with just over four million workers.

The pig industry and field crops are judged to have been hardest hit: government measures to counter a crisis situation were branded as “too little, too late” by those in the sectors concerned and there is little reason to suppose that the government has learnt a great deal from a crisis that is taking agricultural businesses off the map.

The covid pandemic is trotted out as a major contributing cause of the crisis, but as early as 2017, EFRA was hearing evidence from UK veterinary experts that Brexit would cause consequential and structural damage to UK agriculture. This damage is being done, but Brexit is not being blamed for it.

For all the positive noises coming out of EFRA over the government’s welcome measures to make it easier for UK businesses to recruit specialist food industry workers, the stage is set for a chorus to emerge from the wings and narrate the closing scenes of this very public Greek tragedy as it unfolds.

The UK food industry generates GBP 127 billion a year – more than 6% of the Gross Value Added to the national economy. It should be added at this stage that this figure for the sector includes multiple food retailers and their staff.

The National Farmers’ Union reported that a 33% gap in the work force meant that 24% of the UK daffodil harvest went unpicked, while one in ten growers in the Lea Valley Growers’ Association did not sow a third cucumber crop in July 2021, for the lack of people to pick the crop.

Fresh produce producer Riviera Produce Ltd left produce valued at half a million pounds to rot in the fields, while Boxford Suffolk Farms ltd reported that it lost 44 tonnes of fruit due to labour shortages.

The British Meat Processors’ Association warned that its members faced a shortage of more than 15% in staff numbers, while the National Pig Association reported a “…desperate lack of skilled butchers…”, while pig farms were facing serious gaps in their work force. The British Poultry Council went into the summer of 2021 facing a gap of 6,000 staff among its members, in a sector that employs the equivalent of 22,000 in full timers.

There is no reason to suppose that any of these important industry figures is making up or overstating the problems they face. But they all need rather more than a figurative pat on the back and meaningless platitudes.

The report HC713 Labour shortages in the food and farming sector can be consulted online or downloaded at https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/9580/documents/162177/default/

food manufacture UK
Piece of cake?
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The food industry celebrates “meal occasions”, which are excuses to buy and eat food without necessarily qualifying as a meal in its own right. Irish food manufacturer Glanbia suffered a setback for the VAT status of its flapjacks in April when a tribunal decided that the range did not qualify as a cake and was henceforth to be taxed at 20%.

The case hinged upon the suitability of the chewy confectionery bars for serving at afternoon tea. Cakes qualify for zero-percent VAT and a substantial fruit cake would still be classified as cake even if its mouth feel is distinctly heavier than a Victoria sponge.

Many years ago, the makers of Jaffa Cakes mounted a successful case to argue that as the name implied, their product was eligible for a zero-rated VAT status. A patisserie chef was hired to make an oversize Jaffa Cake and field questions from the tribunal, which accepted the basis for the distinction.

Glanbia, it would appear, was not so fortunate. Members of the panel declared that the flapjacks did not earn a place on the table at teatime because they are too robust. English tea is where you have your cake and eat it.

Here is how The Guardian covered the story: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/apr/17/flapjacks-too-chewy-taxed-cakes-judges-rule-glanbia-milk

dairy livestock
Milk prices set to take off
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The farmgate milk price has risen by nearly 24% during the year ending March 31, 2022. For most of this time, prices tracked the five-year minima, but started to rise steeply from January and into February, closing the gap on five-year highs as the spring flush appears on the horizon. This is the time of year when the majority of UK dairy farms plan for calving, since there is usually strongly growing grass and the longer days promise more favourable weather for the next generation of cattle.

With a high proportion of cows starting a lactation in a normal year, milk volumes would go up, reaching a peak later in the summer. A slower start to the spring flush is a marker for a more difficult year, while the rising farmgate price gives cause for concern, since it would suggest that there are fewer lactating cattle to supply the market.

There is, however, another factor that will push producer prices up. The UK dairy industry has a lot of milk tankers on the road and unprocessed milk is a high mileage market. Steep rises in fuel costs will also impact the headline producer price of milk. source

animal products food production
Producers get a grip on their markets
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Levy-funded body AHDB routinely publishes snapshots of retail market trends, like this one from Retail Insight Manager Grace Randall. Demand for red meat is being boosted by a five-year high in ready meals sales, Randall tells us, from her reading of Kantar data. The category is worth more than a billion pounds a year at retail prices and during January 2022, British consumers ate 260 million meaty ready meals. The key factor is a return to time poverty in the wake of the pandemic; millions of people don’t have time to spare in the kitchen cooking food.

animal products livestock pigs UK
Pig sector still struggling
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Despite some welcome signs of change in the fortunes of the pig industry, there are some ominous long term indicators. slaughter weights are starting to ease off from January’s high point. But at about 94kg deadweight, this year’s slaughter pigs are still five kg a head more that this time last year.

Welcome news from Morison’s when the retailer raised its contribution to production costs (SPP) by 30p to GBP 1.80. Pig producers need more retailers to do likewise. More to the point, producers need a more reliable system for recovering their cost of production, just to stay in business.

January pigmeat imports totalling 83,000 tonnes were up over 20% in December, not to mention double the volumes imported a year ago. Bacon imports in January were 27,000 tonnes, compared to 9,500 tonnes a year ago and 17,500 tonnes in December.

Market trends like these spell trouble for UK pig producers.

Since writing this piece in the spring, the AHDB has reported a recovery in market figures to nearer normal levels. However, this does not mean that pig farmers are any better off than they were earlier in the year.

livestock pigs UK
40k and counting
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Delegates at the National Farmers’ Union conference at the end of February learn that at least 40,000 healthy pigs have been culled and taken out of the food chain because of a continuing failure by abattoirs to collect and slaughter all the pigs they contracted to take last year.
Pig farmers up and down the UK are struggling in an ongoing crisis that is leaving hundreds o pigs a week on farms, eating food that is hitting record highs. The BBC cites a Norfolk farmer (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-norfolk-60516864) who is sending 200 a week out of his 300 contracted animals, leaving him with 100 more pigs every week to feed. They eat 10.5 kg of feed a day ad by the time they are finally killed, they will have eaten an extra quarter of a tonne of feed. This is unplanned buying for the animals concerned, at a time when feed is at an all-time high and wheat prices are well over GBP300 a tonne.