Yet Another Cycling Forum
Off Topic => The Pub => Food & Drink => Topic started by: Canardly on 10 August, 2020, 09:02:18 pm
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Has anyone else noticed the recent significant reduction in the range of brands/products availability from the above. I suspect Euro supply contracts are up and are not being renewed due to current undertainties. Baked beans, cabbage and sugar cane here we come, I have taken back control. (treacle was a staple of the poor folk of victorian Englang btw.)
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I noticed it around the time lockdown started. I thought it was a shift of focus on making sure there were beans to be bought, as opposed to a selection of half a dozen brands of basically the same beans. Not been in any other chains much since March, so can't compare.
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I've noticed it in Sainos.
No more French style mayo.
No more vitamin D tabs.
To name but two.
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In times of reduced supply chain function we focus on key brands and reduce range.
"We" being your key-working suppliers to the supermarkets.
It was mostly faux choice anyway.
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What fboab said.
My friend works for a well-known food manufacturer. During the PANIC!!! buying nonsense they reduced their range of pasta sauces from approximately 80 to approximately 20, to streamline the supply chain. I don’t think the world suddenly became a much poorer place because of it.
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Indeed, faux choice is the perennial gift of the supermarkets. Aisles full of products that are mostly just brands, while at the same time reducing overall choice because it's easier and cheaper for them.
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Aisles full of products that are mostly just brands,
Often made in the same factory.
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I've noticed it in Sainos.
No more French style mayo.
No more vitamin D tabs.
To name but two.
Sainos supplied me with 180 x 25 microgram Vitamin D tablets a few weeks ago, for all of £6.
Sainsbury's own brand wholewheat spaghetti is another matter...
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Lidl and Aldi don't have much faux choice anyway. Usually just a couple of options for most things, cheap vs premium.
I've not noticed any particular shortages in my local Lidl. There was an empty freezer cabinet last week, but maybe that was just broken.
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The good lady wife commented on the lack of ice cream selection in Lidl last night but that may be as she was shopping at around 2030 on a rather hot day in a sequence of similar hot days
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Lidl and Aldi don't have much faux choice anyway. Usually just a couple of options for most things, cheap vs premium.
I've not noticed any particular shortages in my local Lidl.
Same here. On the other hand, when things like pasta and flour were in short supply, I noticed that my local Tesco had one faux brand of each. Now that the panic buyers have realised they have enough supplies to last until 2040, and the usual range is back on the shelves, these are "reduced to clear".
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Gorgonzola has now disappeared from both and kitchen towel has been substituted for a poorer quality British made job.
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Wasn't the rationalisation of product varieties/brands something that all the supermarket chains did when the Covid thing kicked off - to ensure that there was food, if not the "my brand" choice?
Aldi & Lidl have been doing this for years anyway with limited ranges of most products/product types - reduced logistics with a smaller supply chain enabling keener prices from manufacturers with increased volumes/economies of scale and (even my wife admits) no real difference in most things. Makes sense to me.
I believe I read that at the start of 2020 Tesco (not picking on them) had about 50 pasta products and 60 or so sausage varieties?
The TV prog that Gregg Wallace does with the food shopping is interesting ..... stupendous savings (although one has to consider the people participating . . . .) with, in most cases, no real difference to the end consumer - and many of the value/essential/"remarksable" (God help us the M&S economy brand at Ocado) etc are made on the same factory's manufacturing lines with either just different labels/packaging or marginally different ingredients.
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Lidl and Aldi don't have much faux choice anyway. Usually just a couple of options for most things, cheap vs premium.
I've not noticed any particular shortages in my local Lidl.
Same here. On the other hand, when things like pasta and flour were in short supply, I noticed that my local Tesco had one faux brand of each. Now that the panic buyers have realised they have enough supplies to last until 2040, and the usual range is back on the shelves, these are "reduced to clear".
Just been in my local Sainsbury’s. Massive stack by the entrance of 2.6kg tins of beans reduced to clear.
If only I was organising an audax this year...
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The TV prog that Gregg Wallace does with the food shopping is interesting ..... stupendous savings (although one has to consider the people participating . . . .) with, in most cases, no real difference to the end consumer - and many of the value/essential/"remarksable" (God help us the M&S economy brand at Ocado) etc are made on the same factory's manufacturing lines with either just different labels/packaging or marginally different ingredients.
This 'same factory line' thing is quite misleading. We run very superficially similar products down our lines but they really aren't the same. Marginally different ingredients can be pretty fundamental differences. And, to be honest, those packaging differences make a difference too - not just in shelf appeal but in product transit protection.
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Jacob's Cream Crackers 300g £1.20
Sainsbury's Cream Crackers 300g 50p
Can you tell the difference?
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Yes, I can but I don't think it's worth 70p.
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Aren't all cream crackers just some kind of compressed cardboard? Do people actually eat them? They were one of the more pointless things of my childhood and not something I'd like to contemplate as a grown-up. If I want cheese and crackers, I don't faff, I reach for the mighty Tuck.
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Who wants cheese and crackers, for goodness' sake? Mad people, that's who. If the Cheese Fairies had meant us to eat the stuff with crackers they wouldn’t have given us bread.
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Who wants cheese and crackers? She does!
https://freschard.bandcamp.com/track/cheese-and-crackers
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I like water biscuits. Made of flour and water.
Apparently they were based on sailors' hard tack.
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I like water biscuits. Made of flour and water.
Apparently they were based on sailors' hard tack.
Matzos are similar but based on the OT...
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Who wants cheese and crackers, for goodness' sake? Mad people, that's who. If the Cheese Fairies had meant us to eat the stuff with crackers they wouldn’t have given us bread.
No, no - the ONLY thing to have with cheese is digestive biscuits (not chocolate!) - or as a fall-back Hovis biscuits.
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Some products have re-emerged (not all), but at differing price points.
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Sainsbury's don't have the range of pulses they had pre-Covid. We have been unable to buy dried black beans in there. There's not even a marker on the shelf for them, they had tinned (well cardboard packaged). Waitrose had some so we bought theirs instead.
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And now Sainsbury have announce the permanent closure of their deli and wet fish counters (possibly meat counter too, I don't recall). I expect Tesco to follow suit - they "temporarily" shut their wet fish counter down during the first lockdown. All this in reaction to "changes in consumer choice" - oh, and lets not forget the increase to already huge (by comparison with many other similar operation) margins that will be gained by less staff, and higher priced pre-packed fish, cold meats etc.
Of course, the individual that wants just a single piece of fish or a couple of slices of ham is out of luck, as there are, in most places, no alternative wet fish shops or delis.
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This is the supermarket model, close the smaller competition, and then restrict choice and ramp up the price. The cost of fruit and veg in a supermarket is up to four times that in a traditional greengrocer (if you can find one).
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That doesn't apply to all fruit and veg though. Supermarkets tend to be cheaper for the more "bulk" items like potatoes and onions, also bananas.
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I dunno these days, but when I used to buy my fruit and veg from the market, everything was cheaper.
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I imagine that a market, especially if it was London, is cheaper again than a greengrocer's. It's one of those seeming ironies that food is more expensive in rural areas.
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I imagine that a market, especially if it was London, is cheaper again than a greengrocer's. It's one of those seeming ironies that food is more expensive in rural areas.
Not surprising though. They don't produce much you can actually eat round here except for game. Wheat, sheep and cows all have to be transported quite a way to be processed these days. Game is very cheap though. Pheasant from about £4 a brace, less if you know someone who works on a shoot.
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Yep, it's all distribution, first for processing then for retail. Hence "seeming".
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To be fair, in London I guess they just stock up at New Convent Garden from whatever's on sale. Here in darkest Surrey, we said goodbye to greengrocers some time ago.
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I dunno these days, but when I used to buy my fruit and veg from the market, everything was cheaper.
It only lasts about 20 minutes when you get it home, though.
We had 2 markets a week in BSE and I would usually be at work while Wednesday's was on. Fruit & veg bought on Saturday would rarely last until Wednesday before being unfit to eat.
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That's the problem with supermarket veg, it's the varieties that keep forever, so they sit around in supply chains, and then on the shelves for a week. That it often doesn't taste of anything is a secondary concern.
I used to like buying stuff from the market, we'd usually eat it the same day anyway. I'm missing that now*, it was quite nice to grab the ingredients for an evening meal each lunchtime.
*admittedly, we moved the London mothership to the South Bank which wasn't nearly as good, it used to be next to Leather Lane which had a nice foodie market, plus there's a great Italian deli on Clerkenwell Road.
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Something I'm noticing is that a number of products go on special offer, then disappear from the shelf, are out of stock for a while, then come back with new packaging.
I think this is due to the new single use plastic directive. Nearly every item I've noticed this with, the packaging has gone from involving black or coloured plastic, to clear.
J
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Black plastic isn't identified in automatic recycling streams. Clear is more reliably recyclable. It's part of the packaging industry's objectives for sustainability- remove black plastic.
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We're told here not to put any black plastic into the recycling.