Customers in the UK are confused whether it’s cheaper to buy bagged or loose fruit, according to new research looking into supermarket trends.
TheWhich? investigation compared the cost of loose and bagged fruit at 700,000 UK stores operated by six grocery chains – Tesco, Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and M&S.
In Asda, it found that a 400g punnet of plums was priced at £2.50 (€3.12) per kg, while a pack of six were priced at 25p per plum. In Tesco, the unit price of two mangos was marked as 88p each, while packed mango chunks were listed as 67p per100g.
The research also found supermarkets ‘guilty’ of rapidly increasing the price of fruit just before it goes on ‘offer’, in order to make any discount seem more significant. For example in one case Ocado strawberries increased in price from £3.89 to £4.38 for two weeks before being marketed as ‘was £4.38 now £2.19’.
Richard Lloyd, Which? executive director, said: “Consumers shouldn’t have to worry about whether a special offer is really ‘special’, so we want the supermarkets to play fair and the government to tighten up pricing guidelines so that people can shop with confidence.”
However, British Retail Consortium food director Andrew Opie said: “Official figures out last week show food is helping to keep overall inflation down, with competition between the supermarkets playing a big part; customers aren’t fools and have no difficulty finding the best value.”
Morrisonsdefended its fruit-selling policy. “We aim to sell fruit in a way that meets the customer’s needs – sometimes packed and sometimes loose,” it said. “Clearly we weigh loose fruit by the kilo but in order to pre-packmany products cost efficiently we do measure the number of fruit per pack.”
