Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets. Joanna Blythman
out low fat versions of popular foods, such as ready meals, as well as focusing on cheaper products such as tinned fruit and frozen vegetables’. In a similar initiative, groups of schoolchildren were invited to visit their local Sainsbury’s, where a team of trained food advisers and registered dieticians would ‘talk to them about the various food groups and how they can choose the best foods to keep them healthy’. Sainsbury’s free fruit in schools also sounded like a commendable initiative until you learnt that this was teamed with ‘fruitastic store tours’ run by Sainsbury’s advisers. The message might be ‘Eat more fruit’, but the missing strapline was ‘and make sure you buy it in Sainsbury’s’.
In one such initiative by Waitrose, this message was made explicit. It sponsors the Kid’s Cookery School (KCS), a charity that encourages children to cook. KCS offers paying cookery workshops with some free places for children from ‘disadvantaged backgrounds’, which have included workshops run by Waitrose staff, focused around visits to Waitrose stores. In the summer of 2002, KCS ran a two-day sponsored extravaganza during which children toured Waitrose and KCS’s principal and chief executive held free workshops for children ‘to promote the fantastic range of fruits and vegetables that Waitrose stock’. Likewise every sheet sent out free to schools as part of Waitrose’s Food Explorers ‘education packs’ carries the prominent flag/logo – some would say advert – Waitrose@school.
Children figure prominently in supermarket healthy-eating drives. The food industry has fostered the concept of separate children’s food as a distinct category from adult food and this has created a whole new gravy train for retailers. As well as Waitrose several other supermarkets have come up with special ranges. Somerfield has the Funky Food Factory, Sainsbury’s offers the Blue Parrot Café, Safeway has its KIDS ‘I’d like …’ range and Waitrose has Food Explorers. Viewed charitably, these healthy-eating drives are sincere, if misguided, attempts to offer healthier food that appeals to children. Viewed cynically, they are efforts to exploit parents who worry about what their offspring eat by developing highly profitable added-value lines. The ranges comprise a selection of items with distinctly different merits. All include small fruits in special packaging. When I checked Waitrose’s offerings in November 2003, Food Explorers bananas cost 19.8 pence each while ordinary small bananas cost 17.9 pence each. This premium charged for Food Explorers was repeated with ‘easy peel’ Clementines. Mini-clementines in the Food Explorers range cost 96 pence per pound while ordinary clementines, larger in size, cost 90 pence per pound. That same month, a Friends of the Earth survey found that in Tesco ‘Kids Snack Pack Carrots’ were on sale at thirteen times the price of Value carrots, a trend repeated at Asda where ‘Snack Pack Carrot Crunchies’ cost ten times more than loose carrots.
When it comes to processed food in children’s ranges, the chains are very careful about what claims they make, the operative word being healthier as opposed to healthy. The Funky Food Factory components contain ‘a minimum of additives’ and levels of salt and sugar are ‘carefully controlled’. The Blue Parrot Café guarantees ‘controlled fat, restricted colours, no preservatives and no added flavour enhancers’. Likewise Food Explorers ‘contains no artificial sweeteners, flavourings and colours’ and contains ‘controlled levels of fat, added sugar and salt’. Safeway says its KIDS ‘I’d like …’ range ‘has been developed within nutritional guidelines to contain controlled levels of fat, salt and sugar so you can rest assured they [children] are eating healthier, nutritionally balanced foods’. Favourites in this range include Chicken Ketchup Kievs, mini jam tarts and Cheese & Onion Sky Mix, described as ‘cheese and onion flavour 3D moon, star and planet-shaped potato, wheat and rice snacks’.
What supermarkets are aiming for in children’s ranges is to provide a tick list of apparently healthy components which encourages parents to put two and two together and make five. They may look good, but in essence they are generally only slightly improved versions of familiar processed foods, often embracing lines which, in any other context, would look like junk. The labelling often seeks to make a major virtue out of every slight improvement. What they should really say on the label is ‘Better than the standard food industry equivalent in some respect’, which is not saying a lot.
The Food Explorers range, for example, claims to be ‘good for children’. Adverts say ‘what may sound like kid’s junk food is, in fact, healthy food’. This reassuring guarantee, however, is applied to some surprising foods. Parents who thought they understood the basics of healthy eating might be at a loss to understand what was especially healthy about raspberry-ripple-flavoured water, toffee caramel balls breakfast cereal, chocolate chip cookies or toffee sauce. This last item – a Food Explorers ‘treat’ – is 65 per cent sugars, but it bears the reassuring label ‘25 per cent less fat than typical toffee sauce’. Many savoury Food Explorers lines are slightly adapted versions of ubiquitous supermarket ready meals such as chicken tikka, sweet and sour chicken, lasagne and shepherd’s pie which do little or nothing to extend the boundaries of children’s eating as their ‘Explorers’ title might imply. As food writer Lynda Brown put it:
The Food Explorers range is not a genuine effort to seriously tackle children’s nutrition, but primarily to wean kids and their mothers on processed food in jazzy packaging that has a bit less of the very ingredients causing problems in the first place. Either that, or they have the audacity to reinvent basic items like dried fruit as something specially designed for kids and charge handsomely for it. As a Waitrose shopper, I am personally very disappointed. There might be the odd okay item, but how on earth a supermarket chain which prides itself on a passion for food quality can think that their gloopy, sickly sweet toffee sauce has anything to do with good food or nutrition beats me. To call such foods a ‘treat’ is insulting their customer’s intelligence.
Sainsbury’s Blue Parrot Café range is promoted as ‘healthier food for kids … specially developed to deliver great taste with improved nutritional quality’. But nutritionists at the Food Commission, the independent food watchdog, were left scratching their heads over several items in the range, not least the blackcurrant-flavoured sparkling water drink.
You might expect that this product with its luscious pictures of blackcurrant fruit would contain enough blackcurrant juice to warrant Sainsbury’s on-pack advice: ‘A glass of fruit juice (150ml) counts towards your 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day’. No such luck. There is so little blackcurrant juice in this product, that a percentage is not even given, which according to food labelling law, indicates that there is so little blackcurrant juice in this bottle that it is simply there as a flavouring. And whilst the product contains some apple juice, sugar is the top ingredient after water.
was the Food Commission’s withering assessment.
Sainsbury’s interpretation of healthy eating advice has already ruffled feathers at the Department of Health. Along with Tesco and Somerfield, it has spurned the government’s five-a-day logo. Sainsbury’s says that the government logo is ‘too restrictive because it can only be applied to fresh fruit and vegetable products that have no added salt, fat or sugar’. All three chains have their own five-a-day logos, which allow a broader interpretation that can embrace processed food.
There is more than an element of poacher-turned-gamekeeper in supermarkets’ attitude to healthy eating, because the truth is that our large food retailers all make considerable profit out of selling over-processed, nutritionally debased, industrial food and have no intention of surrendering that in a benevolent mission to rescue the nation’s health. Their apparently high-minded aspirations are given the lie by the relative loading of what they actually sell.
Take a few minutes to walk the aisles of a typical supermarket and roughly measure for yourself how much aisle space is given to each broad category of food. You don’t need a tape measure for this exercise; paces will do. Then divide everything edible you see into two categories: first fresh, unprocessed raw ingredients, and then processed food. What will be instantly apparent is how the latter dwarfs