UK consumers shopping around

As SeafoodSource Contributing Editor Jason Holland reported last week, the big four supermarket chains in the U.K. — Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda (part of Wal-Mart) and Morrisons — are in trouble. Indeed, Tesco, which is one of the world’s biggest supermarkets, recently sacked its chief executive because of continuously falling profits, while the CEO of Morrisons must be wondering if he will be the next to go as that company’s profits are expected to halve this year.

It seems as though the days of the weekly trip to a big supermarket, usually sited outside of town, are over. “Consumers don’t want to shop like that anymore,” Andrew Stevens, analyst at retail information specialist, Verdict, told the Dispatches television program. “Shoppers want to shop to a budget, spread out over the week, and in simpler formats.”

This could well mean that the days of huge supermarkets are coming to an end. Dalton Philips, the CEO of Morrisons, has referred to building outlets on large out-of-town plots as “property albatrosses around [our] necks.”

At the end of last month Tesco announced that it is going to build houses on sites it had purchased for building new stores, and meanwhile Sainsbury’s has nearly doubled the number of its Local convenience store openings during the past three years. As the name suggests these are smaller stores located inside town centers.

Some of these changes can be attributed to the rise in popularity of the German discount stores Aldi and Lidl, whose stores are usually located in towns rather than outside and sell food products at very low prices. The habit of seeking out a bargain during the economic recession has not changed — consumers are still looking for the cheapest prices they can get.

These changes have led, or are leading, to what has been described as a genuine price war between the Big Four supermarkets. In the past, according to Dispatches, price cuts in one area have always been matched by price rises in another so a supermarket’s profit margins stay at the same level.

Now things are different. According to the U.K. Office for National Statistics, British food and drink prices in May and June this year were lower than they were a year ago.

How is this going to affect retail sales of seafood? The discounters, while promoting some items aggressively such as the GBP 4.99 (USD 8.39, EUR 6.25) lobster — extremely cheap for the British public — are not known for selling a wide selection of fish and shellfish. Cheap species such as farmed pangasius from Vietnam, which sells well in the U.K., may be on display, but it is the bigger supermarkets that have the most variety.

And, of course, the independents also stock many different types of fish and shellfish. Will fishmongers benefit from consumers shopping at different outlets rather than just the big supermarkets? Certainly it seems as though they could, and perhaps should, pick up extra customers if they make their offerings as convenient to cook and serve as possible.

All supermarkets now give away discs of flavored butter to accompany fish fillets packed in a bag which can just be placed in an oven to cook without the customer ever having to actually touch the fish at all.

Meanwhile, the spectre of diminishing food supplies in relation to an ever-growing population continues to raise its head, but may benefit the seafood industry. It has been calculated that it takes more than 10kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef. As well as being beneficial from a health point of view, it has been estimated that ending this practice worldwide would release enough cereals to feed another three billion people.

This may be all right for vegetarians but will people looking for animal protein in their meals switch to fish? This could really open up the debate on what is fed to farmed fish.

And will this fish be served in supermarkets in the future, or will the next generation of consumers shop in an entirely different manner?