Weekend Feature: Thoughts on Waste

Many readers of AudlemOnline will have watched Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's BBC1 programmes over the past two weeks about the appalling waste of good food created by Britain's supermarkets and their obsession with perfect looking vegetables.

Unfortunately, it's an obsession that costs the supermarkets little but pushes Britain's farming industry into despair.

In the programmes, the broadcaster focussed on Morrisons and the way they treated a three-generations farming family who grew parsnips into finally giving up the struggle. As regular readers will know, Morrisons has also been one of the worst supermarkets for milk prices, an issue that has affected Britain's dairy industry severely.

The pile of parsnips seen in the photo would all be rejected by Morrisons purely on cosmetic grounds meaning a significant proportion of the crop goes to waste each year. In addition, the supermarket cancelled or reduced orders very regularly, often changing orders overnight, but always leaving the poor farmer carrying the cost.

Morrisons' response to the programme was about as dire a handling of a public relations issue as I have ever seen. Having run the PR for a number of high profile companies for twenty five years, I was astonished at how inept the supermarket giant was.

I always tried to impose a rule where I worked that "If I cannot explain a policy on TV in a few seconds, the policy is wrong." It's clearly not a principle that has ever occurred to Morrisons' PR team.

First they tried to put off an interview with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and then agreed but still put him off for six months. At the same time, they were telling the parsnip farmer to "kill this story as we are not going to take part" as if the farmer would not tell Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall of this conflicting stance.

The farmer eventually decided that there was no point continuing to grow parsnips and supplying Morrisons and showed the broadcaster all the evidence about the way the supermarket treats its suppliers.

Eventually, Morrisons did concede an interview which was held in one of their supermarkets by two senior executives. It was clear that those executives simply did not realise they even had a problem filling their responses with unsympathetic tosh such as "If they don't want to keep to our standards, the suppliers can sell to someone else." As if that's easy when just a few supermarkets control most of the market.

If the likes of Morrisons are not going to fall foul of public revulsion at the way they deal with Britain's farmers, they certainly need to clean up their act and learn how to deal with a TV interview request from the likes of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. On the evidence of last week's performance, they have a very long way to go.

All in all, the programmes were a great argument to shop locally and to support Audlem's own shops.

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