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arehouse. Tesco, Britain's biggest private-sector employer, has its headquarters in a Stalinist bunker in a nasty bit of north-east London. Beside the main reception its share price is proudly displayed on one of those blackboards with white plastic letters stuck on to it that you see in the cheapest sandwich bars. One of the manifestations of retailers' power (which also reinforces it) is the growth of private-label (ie, supermarket- not producer-branded) goods. In 2002, according to the Boston Consulting Group, own-label made up 39% of grocery sales in Britain, 21% in France and only 16% in the United States, but everybody thinks that, as retailing becomes more concentrated, America is going the way of Britain. Retailers can sell private-label only if the price cuts they offer mean more to consumers than a producer's brand. As own-label has expanded, so supermarkets have been taking all but the most successful brands off their shelves. “If you are a must-have brand it's fine,” says Dido Harding, Tesco's commercial director. “If you're a sub-global brand, life's much harder.”The shift in power to retailers has put pressure on producers' margins, hence huge programmes of cuts. Since 2000, Uni-lever has cut its workforce by 33,000 to 245,000 and dropped lots of minor brands as part of its “path to growth” strategy. Cadbury is the latest to announce big cuts: in October it said that it will be shutting 20% of its 133 factories and cutting 10% of its 55,000 global workforce. These cuts should help keep costs, and thus the price of food, low.Does cheap food make people unhealthy? In some ways. Hydrogenated vegetable oil, for instance—vegetable fat made solid by adding hydrogen atoms—is the nutritionists' current bête noire. Widely used as a cheap substitute for butter and cream, it is the main dietary source of trans fats. Trans fats are heavily implicated in heart disease; companies are taking them out of products for fear of lawsuits.Cheap food may also make people eat more. In a paper entitled “Why have Americans become more obese?” David Cutler, Jesse Shapiro and Edward Glaeser, a group of Harvard economists, note that, among OECD countries, obesity is correlated to the level of regulation: the more food laws, the more protected local producers are, the harder it is to import technology, the slimmer people tend to be. They reckon that is because of price: the less regulated a country, the cheaper a Big Mac tends to be. But it could be another factor: heavily regulated countries might, for instance, be places with stronger family ties where real meals have survived and people eat fewer snacks and less fast food.
Giving people bigger portions is an easy way of making them feel they have got a better dealFood companies certainly think giving people more food for their money makes them buy more. That is why portions have been getting larger and larger. In America, soft drinks, which used to come in 8oz and then 12oz containers now come in 20oz ones. As Dennis Lombardi of Technomic, a food-industry consultancy in Chicago, points out, giving people bigger portions is an easy way of making them feel they have got a better deal. “If I can give you an 8oz portion for $7, I can give you a 12oz portion for $8. The only incremental cost to me is the food, which probably cost 25 cents.” Everybody, therefore, has done it.Scientists have shown that portion size partly determines how much people eat. Barbara Rolls, a nutrition professor at Pennsylvania State University, fed subjects macaroni cheese, some in 2.5-cup p
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