Interest and speculation surrounding Tesco's plans to revitalise its fresh produce offer is growing ahead of the group's planned preliminary results announcement on 18 April, with the retailer apparently looking to improve its reputation on fresh food in general as it seeks to reverse a recent decline in market share.
New figures released by Kantar Worldpanel earlier this week showed that Tesco's share of the UK retail market had fallen to 29.7 per cent in the three months to 19 February, its lowest level for seven years, as rival chain Sainsbury's, discounters like Aldi and Lidl, and upmarket supermarket operator Waitrose continued to make gains.
It is now widely accepted that the widespread discounting rolled out by Tesco before Christmas as part of its Big Price Drop promotion failed to convince shoppers, many of whom found their Clubcard points being noticeably eroded.
In its fresh produce departments, there have already been signs that Tesco is looking to instill more confidence in its product quality among consumers.
Towards the start of this year, the group gave away copies of a special book entitled All You Want to Know About Fruit with every basket of shopping worth £40 or more.
Also, in late 2011, staff working on the retailer's fresh fruit and vegetable departments began wearing special uniforms bearing the words 'Fruit and Veg Team'.
While it has been suggested that this is part of a new initiative under which those teams carry out regular department checks, such efforts would in fact not be new in Tesco stores, where produce aisles have been regularly inspected for many years.
However, it may well be that the regularity of such checks is increased, particularly if rumoured plans to employ more staff on fresh food departments do indeed materialise.
'It's range, quality and service where we feel we can be much stronger,' chief executive Philip Clarke told investors in January, when he also revealed that employees would be given additional training in areas including fresh food.
Clearly the desire to focus on price is ebbing at Tesco's Cheshunt headquarters. Natalie Berg, global research director at Planet Retail, told Bloomberg: 'They clearly became too price focused and that's not a differentiator in the supermarkets anymore.'
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