Yuk - the sausage rolls with just 6% pork

Big supermarkets’ budget food is selling well but its quality is poor

SOME of Britain’s biggest supermarket chains are compromising on quality by selling budget items such as sausage rolls with as little as 6% pork. 

Sainsbury’s and Tesco are working hard to market their low-cost lines as they compete with discount chains to attract cash-strapped shoppers. 

This is often coming at the expense of quality, however. An analysis of low-cost foods at the two chains has found, in addition to the sausage rolls, fisherman’s pies with 9% fish and square cheese slices with 11% cheese. The products have been bulked out with ingredients such as water, animal fat and sugar. 

The items help the supermarkets to undercut bargain-basement stores such as Aldi and Lidl, which have posed a growing threat as middle-class families seek to economise. 

In many cases the German-owned discount chains also have higher-quality food than the bigger chains. 

Professor Tom Sanders, head of nutritional sciences at King’s College London, said: “This is cheap, second-rate food ingredients masquerading as real food. They are heavily processed foods using added fat, water and sugar. People tempted by the low prices should look carefully at the labels.” 

At Sainsbury’s, the Basics range is now a vital plank in the supermarket’s strategy. Justin King, chief executive of Sainsbury’s, said earlier this month that a 25% increase in sales of Basics products had boosted half-year profits to £272m. 

He was less expansive, however, about the quality of the budget range. Four chicken and vegetable pies, for example, cost 84p but contain only 9% chicken and 2% vegetables. 

The back of the packet shows that there are 44 ingredients. The main ones are wheat flour, water and margarine along with additives such as maize starch, emulsifiers, glucose syrup and colourings. 

Sainsbury’s chocolate mousse costs 28p but contains only 2% chocolate. The main ingredients are milk, sugar and cream. The main ingredient in Basics tinned curry, at 48p, is water; chicken is 12%. 

At Tesco, the Value range is almost identical in terms of price and ingredients. Both supermarkets sell processed cheese slices that cost 51p but contain only 11% cheese. The main ingredient is whey powder, a byproduct of cheese making, followed by vegetable oil, milk proteins and emulsifying salts. 

At Tesco, a 700g pack of frozen sausage rolls costs 65p but contains 6% pork. The main ingredient is water followed by wheat flour and vegetable oil, with added pork fat, salt and emulsifiers. 

The Tesco Value 300g fisherman’s pie is 75p, almost £2 cheaper than the standard 500g fish pie, but contains almost two thirds less fish at just 9%. The main ingredients are mashed potato and water with added fish stock and gelling agents such as pectin. A tin of Tesco Value chicken curry costs 48p but is only 12% chicken. 

Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, said: “It’s about consumer expectations. You would expect a fisherman’s pie, for example, to be mostly fish. If it contains mostly potato with 9% fish then it should be called potato pie with a bit of fish.” 

The Basic and Value budget ranges are cheaper than food in the discount stores. But Aldi and Lidl’s food is often cheaper than the standard ranges in Tesco and Sainsbury’s – and a second survey found that it was often better quality, too. 

Sainsbury’s own brand marmalade, for example, costs 75p and has 26g fruit per 100g. At Lidl, however, the orange marmalade has 5% more fruit and costs 55p. 

In Tesco, 500g of pasta sauce contains 56% tomato and 9% puree and costs 79p. In Lidl, a similar jar of pasta sauce costs 67p and contains 72% tomato. 

Tesco’s bramley apple pies cost 69p and have 15% apple. Aldi’s Holly Lane bramley apple pies cost the same amount but contain 45% apple. 

Sainsbury’s wafer-thin cooked ham costs £2.38 for 400g while 450g of Tesco wafer-thin honey-roast ham costs £2.98. Both contain 80% pork. At Lidl, by contrast, 400g of wafer-thin ham contains 97% pork and costs £2.19. 

Tesco and Sainsbury’s cream of tomato soup both cost 39p and contain 68% and 74% tomato puree respectively. Aldi tomato soup costs 37p but contains 91% tomato puree.  continues here

Cost of a shopping basket soars in the 'phoney' supermarket price war

British supermarkets have introduced massive price hikes over the past year, shattering the myth of a so-called price war in which grocers are bending over backwards to help hard-pressed consumers. 

Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury's have ramped up the price of many products by between 22 and 32 per cent over the past 13 months, hitting customers at a time when the cost of living is soaring, The Independent can reveal. 

The soaring figures illustrate the level of food inflation heaped on consumers, as they face spiralling petrol prices, rising utility bills and stagnating house prices. The revelation comes at a time when grocers are as active as ever in claiming that they are delivering millions of pounds of price cuts to consumers. 

On a sample of 17 products, Sainsbury's has hiked prices by 31.6 per cent, Tesco by 27.5 per cent and Asda by 21.6 per cent between 11 June 2007 and 11 July 2008, according to grocery price comparison site, mysupermarket.co.uk. 

The Independent tracked 17 products including thick-sliced white bread (800g), six pints of semi-skimmed milk, English butter (250g) and garden peas (1kg).

Tesco has raised the price of white bread from 54p to 72p; Sainsbury's has hiked the price of Basmati rice (1kg) from 90p to £1.89p; and Asda has increased English butter from 58p to 94p, as have its other two rivals. 

These figures dwarf the estimates of the British Retail Consortium, which this week said that food cost 7 per cent more in British supermarkets in June than it did in the same month last year. 

Before the last weekend in June, Tesco said it would reduce the price of 3,000 items by up to 50 per cent, while Asda promised to sell 10 staple items, including bread, eggs and butter for only 50p until end of trading on 29 June. However, industry experts say the current activity on price does not compare to previous battles, and is more about PR than helping consumers. 

Greg Lawless, an analyst at Blue Oar, says: "I don't think there is a price war. This is a price skirmish. The last proper price war we had was in the early 1990s ... It's not in Tesco and Asda's interests to launch a price war as it would suck profits out of the sector." 

Retailers themselves agree. Malcolm Walker, chief executive of the frozen food specialist Iceland, said successful retailers would not do anything to jeopardise their profit margins. He said: "No retailer can afford to drop more than one point – one-tenth of 1 per cent – on the gross margin and anything they do on price is tactical." He added: "It is all marketing and spin."

Bryan Roberts, global research director at Planet Retail, made the point that price cuts and promotions were often funded by suppliers. He said: "Effectively, promotions cost the retailers nothing because it is the suppliers who are often asked to invest in these 'price promotions'." 

The big three grocers say that while the price of commodities, such as wheat, meat and dairy products, have risen sharply over the past year, they try to cut prices for products that are not affected by the same inflationary pressures. continues here