Category - Food

Well, well, well. I just did a bit of delving to find out why someone had found the blog on the search term “why is UK productivity so low”, which had thrown up an article I’d pretty much forgotten I’d written. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I mentioned Asda in that.

Then, browsing the BBC website, I found this article which says Asda is considering cutting up to 2,500 jobs.

Asda has two problems: 1) too many chiefs, and 2) most of them are incompetent.

I shop in Asda regularly, though I am increasingly having to complete my shop elsewhere because of the stock levels. My branch is open 24 hours, but its shelf stock does not match that detail in any way, shape, or form. Asda stocks up in the middle of the night and early morning, then that’s pretty much it until the next night. On top of that, they keep running “Rollback” offers on things, and haven’t cottoned on to the fact that this encourages the owners of corner shops to come in and buy everything up so they can resell it at the RRP in their own store. By 10am, the shelves are empty of those items. I’m also pretty sure some people buy some things on Rollback to sell on Ebay at the normal price.

That’s the thing about large retailers. They can buy at much better prices than smaller sellers can, and even their normal retail prices are better than you can find in the cash & carries. Beer is a prime example – Asda’s normal prices for a case of 12 bottles are £3 – £4 cheaper than the cash & carry offers, but when they put it on Rollback, it can be as much as £10 cheaper! When that happens, even pub owners  go in and buy up stock. This Rollback discount problem also applies to many items in grocery, snacks, and confectionery.

Asda also has a problem with stock control. The amount of shelf space it gives to various products is fixed for long periods of time. So it doesn’t matter if they repeatedly sell out of one particular item (even a chimp would realise that’s because people want it), they will still maintain row after row of slower selling items, and maintain the 2 sq. ft. they allow for the item that is selling. Then, when they run out of warehouse stock, they will make no attempt to get anymore of that product until the next scheduled delivery – often weeks later. Management cannot see that if they held stock of things that sell, they would sell more of it.

Then there’s the Dairy items. I don’t piss about with low-fat stuff – if it’s got 50% less fat, it’s also got 50% less taste – yet they have shelf after shelf of that, whilst the normal-fat stuff sells out completely every day, and the shelves stay empty until the next midnight re-stock.

It’s no wonder that they’re struggling. And they’ll keep struggling until they start taking on managers who have a clue.

Every year, like all big corporations, Heinz will take on a bunch of new graduates and let them loose with flipcharts, Lego bricks, Play-doh, finger paints, and all the other things that pass for good Team Meeting props these days (I’ve worked for a big company, so I know that’s what happens). Also like all big corporations, every 5 years or so, Heinz decides that it needs to do Something Big – whether it needs doing or not – and duly assigns the current crop of graduates to come up with something (I know THAT happens, too). In Heinz’s case, this typically seems to boil down to removing the flavour from one of its existing successful products, changing the texture of one so that instead of being able to stick to vertical surfaces, it’ll run even on a flat one, or renaming one so that it appeals to people who listen to rap music and watch the Teletubbies. Sometimes, Heinz will do all three of these things at the same time to just one product.

Unlike the company that I used to work for, where the products were medicines, and so pissing about with the formulations and presentations was a no-no, Heinz makes food products, and these have no such protection. Consequently, if he or she is lucky and arrives at just the right time, the average new graduate can really carve out their future career by having a field day changing things using such tried and tested methods as removing salt, sugar, fat (and therefore any taste or familiar texture), and putting less of it in a pack and selling it at a higher price.

The current flavour of the month is Salad Cream, which Heinz owns, and which appears to be on some sort of hit list. To anyone who doesn’t know, salad cream is a thinned down mayonnaise-like dressing with a tangy flavour. It goes great with salads, whether they’re on a plate or between two slice of bread. It also works with plain ham, tuna, even cheese sandwiches – with or without salad items included. A drizzle before adding the top slice of bread brings the sandwich alive. But the thing is, it’s called “salad cream” because it’s always been called that.

Heinz has tried to rename it at least once in the recent past, and I also seem to recall some historical issues over recipe tweaking. They’re on the case again, and the upshot seems to have been that someone somewhere decided that since not everyone who uses Salad Cream pours a nice round dollop (see the photo above) on a plate alongside two lettuce leaves, two spring onions, and half a tomato, the name “salad cream” is grossly misleading and must be changed forthwith. As an aside, you’d have a job putting a “dollop” of Salad Cream on a plate these days thanks to the aforementioned recipe tweaks. It’d be more of a “squirt”. But that’s a different story.

I’m pretty sure that students – who, after all, are the immediate precursor to graduates – might be involved here, since they’re likely to put it on anything from Mars Bars to crisps (potato chips, for American readers). If they’re short of money, they’d probably eat it neat, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they also used it as a lubricant when they’re having sex. As a result of all that – and, I mean, it’s obvious when you think about it – it should immediately be rebranded as “sandwich cream” (and I just realised there’s a double entendre there, which is purely accidental).

Fortunately, Heinz has seen sense (until the next time) and bowed to public pressure to leave it alone. Bearing in mind that Heinz had decided to go ahead with the change until the public found out, and had probably had the label artwork at least partly produced, they could have saved themselves a lot of money by just asking me first.

Digressing slightly, I remember an episode years ago at a squash club I was a member of. The young (17 year old) son of one of the members was in the bar one night, and he ordered a pint of orange juice and Coca Cola, mixed. It was apparently the “in drink” at University. It looked like diarrhoea, and to make matters worse, he had just crunched his way through a whole pack of Polo Mints – and we all know what anything tastes like after you’ve eaten mints. I just thought he was a berk, and that orange juice and Coca Cola would happily survive as separate drinks into the future (and I was right). The kind of people who run companies like Heinz would immediately see it as an opportunity to get rid of both orange juice and Coca Cola because they “don’t appeal to younger drinkers”.

The raw (and probably some of the in-store cooked) chicken sold at stores like Marks & Spencer, Aldi, Lidl, The Co-op, Tesco, and Sainsbury’s is supplied by a company called 2 Sisters Food Group, based in Birmingham. It was founded in 1993 and has an annual revenue of over £3 billion. It has numerous subsidiaries, including Fox’s Biscuits.

Following an undercover operation involving ITV and The Guardian, it was revealed this week that workers at the West Bromwich plant had been changing the slaughter dates of chicken processed there. The company was also taking food back from supermarkets and repackaging and redistributing it. They are currently being investigated by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) as a result.

Back in 2013, 2 Sisters was fined £100,000 by FSA for shelf life date offences. In 2014, chicken which had been dropped on the factory floor at the Scunthorpe site was seen to be put back on the production line during an investigation into high levels of campylobacter in the UK food chain. 2 Sisters admitted to breaches of the rules, but was not fined.

In an update to the current issue, 2 Sisters has “suspended operations”. It isn’t explicitly stated that this suspension applies to just the West Bromwich plant, but I assume that’s what it means. But this is the part that sends shivers up my spine:

The 2 Sisters Food Group said staff at its site in the West Midlands will need to be “appropriately retrained” before it starts resupplying customers…

…the company said an internal investigation had shown “some isolated instances of non-compliance” at its plant in West Bromwich.

“We have therefore decided to temporarily suspend operations at the site to allow us the time to retrain all colleagues, including management, in all food safety and quality management systems.”

All staff will remain on full pay and take part in training on site, it added.

The thing that is clear is that someone somewhere was openly committing a crime – quite probably documented on film, one would assume, if ITV was involved. Even if those people were acting independently, they were still guilty, but it is more realistic to suppose that they were following orders, which widens the net both outwards and upwards.

So it makes you wonder how “retraining” of “colleagues” addresses this fairly obvious conclusion, and how being paid a full salary in the meantime goes anywhere near dealing with it appropriately.

This is an Australian story, but it reports that McDonald’s over there is about to take “one of the biggest risks in the company’s history” by introducing fresh beef patties to its menu. Apparently, ordering one adds about a minute to your waiting time, since the fresh beef patties are prepared to order, whereas the normal type are made ahead of time and kept warm until required.

I had to do a bit of a double-take when I read that, because in the UK it seems to be standard practice for McDonald’s restaurants not to prepare anything ahead of time, and to cook everything to order. At the drive-thru, a simple order of a cheeseburger can get you a ten-minute wait in one of the bays. I have gone inside to demand my money back on more than one occasion, and I’ve complained to head office at least twice. To be fair, most branches have improved, but I absolutely refuse to say anything positive about motorway branches, because late at night they have to cook everything. There is nothing ready. But I digress: a whole minute is nothing in the UK compared to what is “normal” over here.

They already do these fresh beef patties in America:

A customer in Dallas named Tracy Moore told Reuters that she’s going to stop patronizing the fast-food chain, which she currently visits every day, if the wait time doesn’t improve.

“If it’s going to be that long every time, I won’t order it. I’d go elsewhere,” she said, after ordering the new fresh-beef Quarter Pounder at a McDonald’s drive thru and being told to pull into a parking spot to wait several minutes until it was ready.

She doesn’t know she’s born! Oh, what I wouldn’t give to only have to wait “several minutes”. Sorry, digressing again.

The article adds:

Improving service has been a primary goal of McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook over the last couple years. He has cut dozens of items from the fast-food chain’s menu to try and simplify and speed up kitchen operations.

I think he’s barking up the wrong tree, though he may be doing it deliberately, and attacking a secondary issue to protect the primary one.

In the UK, absolutely the only reason there is a delay to service is that there is nothing ready and they have to prepare it. They might have a few bits ready, but the days when the rack behind the counter would be stacked with carton after carton of Big Macs and other burgers are long gone. If it’s busy, they run out and you have to wait, and if it’s quiet there’s nothing ready anyway and you have to wait. The franchise holder – McDonald’s restaurants are all franchised – does it to reduce waste. No wait, let me rephrase that – he does it to save money.

Three key words in McDonald’s business are: SERVICE, WASTE, COST.

Once upon a time, service was far and away the most important aspect at McDonalds. As time has gone by it has passed through waste, and now sits firmly entrenched in cost. But what Steve Easterbrook seems to have forgotten (I know he hasn’t, really, even  if it looks like he has) is that fast food is low margin. You make money by shifting tonnes of the stuff, not by glamming it up, and you can’t shift any of it if there isn’t any to shift.

It’s funny when you consider that for each Big Mac costing £2.99, about £0.75 of that is gross profit to the restaurant, about £0.80 covers the materials, and the rest is down to labour costs. It’s even funnier when you consider that if a McDonald’s branch pisses me off, I won’t go in again for months (in the case of Clifton, years) just on principle. The manager’s decision not to risk having to throw away just over £2 guarantees he will lose £2.99 from me, and that woman in Dallas suggests I may not be the only one.

On a slightly different topic, a couple of the Facebook posts below the article made me smile.

This character is a vegan and he makes the assertion that eating meat and dairy gives you cancer. Someone challenges him, and he then goes on to declare that vegans do not need to take supplements as a result of not eating meat and dairy.

Actually, Mr Phillips, most vegan-friendly nutritionists and doctors – many of whom are vegans themselves – point out that Vitamin B12 supplements are pretty much essential for vegans, since this cannot be obtained reliably outside meat and dairy. He might want to take a look on the label on his oat milk or other favourite processed vegan foods – virtually all of them are fortified with the very vitamins that only occur naturally in meat and dairy.

Organisations like The Vegan Society don’t make such a big deal out of things if they’re not important or significant.

This dietitian at Vegan R.D. goes further and suggests that as well as B12 supplements being important for all vegans, most should also take Vitamin D and Iodine supplements, and some should also consider Calcium and Iron.

I’ve written before of my still-recurring nightmares about Teamworking and the hell I had to put up with for the final ten years of my time in the rat race. Not that long ago, Sainsbury’s made the mistake of allowing “the Team” to become involved in things which were really none of their business, and which were well beyond their wit to consider the full implications involved. Of course, also of similar magnitude on the Stupid Scale was the Boaty McBoatface fiasco, and the “decision” to leave the EU.

It’s just what happens when idiots allow even bigger idiots to become involved in important decision making.

Weetabix has now had a go at demonstrating how stupid its staff are, and is just as guilty of not ring-fencing the situation as Sainsbury’s and the British Government (specifically, ex-PM David Cameron) were to protect itself from the subsequent and inevitable bad publicity.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Weetabix is a breakfast cereal which, in its most common form, comes as formed blocks of cereal. Like any 21st Century cereal, on its own it tastes like cardboard, and is only rendered edible – it’s actually rather nice – by the addition of milk and a little sugar sprinkled on top. Technically, it only remains “nice” for a few minutes before it turns into a gloop that is almost identical to wallpaper paste, but that’s a different story.

Weetabix staff appear to have held a brainstorming session at some point (this is by its own admission), and “the Team” came up with the idea of putting ham and poached eggs on the top! It’s apparently a “British version of Eggs Benedict”. Weetabix management is now frantically trying to underplay the negative reaction to it:

Weetabix admitted staff got “a ‘little’ enthusiastic” during a brainstorming session, adding it “seemed like a good idea at the time”.

“We hope we can put this behind us and still make breakfast work, perhaps with something more traditional like milk and fruit,” they added.

“This recipe is for those who like a little more adventure with their cereal.”

I don’t doubt that there will be some who go so far as to try it – and even claim it tastes good. But of course, some people voted for “Boaty McBoatface” and Brexit.

Incidentally, Weetabix management seems to be turning lack of control over its staff into a bit of a habit. I’ve noticed a few times now that there is a new advert for LIQUID Weetabix – a so-called “breakfast drink”. I have to avert my eyes when it comes on, as it makes me want to throw up. Gloopy Weetabix is bad enough, but a version which is manufactured so it is pre-gloopy (or conveys that image) is just obscene.

I’ve seen this in various newspapers today (including online ones). The BBC refers to it as a “Ketchup debate”, but in reality there is nothing to debate. The silly saga has come about because an Asda branch in London has started stacking it in chiller cabinets instead of on the shelves with other condiments, as they have always done until now.

Irrespective of what the so-called experts have said in the articles, which is very little, ketchup is cooked during manufacture and packed into bottles while it is still at about 90°C. It is deaerated first to further reduce the risk of microbial growth, and it contains vinegar, salt, and sugar, which help act as preservatives. The bottles are sealed and cooled, so it is under a partial vacuum until someone opens it to use it. In effect, until the seal is broken, it is pretty much sterile.

To that end, unopened ketchup can – and should – be stored at room temperature, with no adverse effects. Storing it in the fridge is a waste of time and money, and since it uses more energy it’s also negative for the environment.

Once opened, bacteria and yeasts immediately get inside the bottle. It’s even worse if it’s café ketchup, because it will probably be a cheaper brand, and all the dirty scumbags who seem to frequent cafés will have poked their used knives inside to dislodge it (Heinz themselves encouraged this in one of their stupid adverts – ketchup used to be as thick as putty, but subsequent reformulations have rendered it more like thick soup, making knife-poking a pointless exercise).

Dirty practices, natural contamination, and cost-cutting and pseudo-health driven reformulations which have reduced the preserving power of ketchup, mean that it ferments in the bottle once opened – readily when warm, but even when stored in the fridge, though to a much lesser extent. Unless someone has poked something nasty into it with the knife they’ve previously had in their mouth, this fermentation is usually harmless. But it does mean that any ketchup stuck in the neck of a bottle is likely to leap out at you next time you open the lid. It’s happened to me a few times in the past, which is why I always correctly store part-used ketchup in the fridge.

As if this weren’t enough, Heinz themselves state you can store unopened ketchup in a cupboard, but you should refrigerate it once opened and use it within (I think) eight weeks, though eight weeks is a bit conservative in my experience. So what’s to debate? It’s more a case of letting idiots have their say (a lot like Brexit, really), even though anything other than the Heinz advice (or “remain”) is completely wrong.

That’s what’s the matter with the world today! People don’t get told they’re wrong, anymore. They just give dumb opinions which become part of general “knowledge”.