Pricewatch »

• Cost-conscious cooking

  January 19, 2009 @ 11:15 am | by Conor Pope

  BUDGET COOK BOOKS will be big this year. The Frugal Cook, The Kitchen Revolution and (the gloriously titled) How to Feed Your Whole Family a Healthy, Balanced Diet with Very Little Money and Hardly Any Time, Even If You Have a Tiny Kitchen, Only Three Saucepans (One With an Ill-fitting Lid) and No Fancy Gadgets – Unless You Count the Garlic Crusher are just three of the big-selling cookery books currently attracting interest from cash conscious consumers who like to eat good food.
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• Marmitey Man

  August 26, 2008 @ 11:54 am | by Conor Pope

  While I am not adverse to the odd marmite sandwich, I was pretty horrified to read – in The Sun, admittedly – today of the builder who has been living on little else for the last quarter of a century. The builder named George apparently eats the savoury spread at every meal and each month he makes his way through a stack of sandwiches seven feet high. He’s not entirely adverse to variety in his diet, however, and occasionally adds beetroot, bananas, celery and sardines to his marmite treats.

  Incidentally, wordpress has just told me that this is my 400th post (I am glad it’s about such a worthy topic!) I might go make myself a marmite, beetroot, bannana and sardine sandwich to mark the occasion.

• Have your say on labels

  July 3, 2008 @ 12:43 pm | by Conor Pope

  The Food Safety Authority of Ireland is holding a national food labelling public consultation and wants consumers and “interested parties” (that’d be manufacturers, then) to have their say. Most informed consumer groups favour a traffic light system, which see food high in calories, salt, sugar and fat stamped with a red light while more wholesome option would have a green light. Manufacturers horrified by the thought of having to put a big red danger symbol on their packaging disagree and say a gentler Guideline Daily Allowance system is better. To bolster their argument they point to cheese which is high in fat but is actually good for people in moderation.

  Whatever the EU eventually goes for will be an improvement in this country. Food labelling in Ireland is absolutely woeful and there is an urgent need to radically overhaul the system so that it is of some value to consumers. The labelling system as it stands in Ireland is neither mandatory nor clear cut. For a start, working out how much salt you’re eating is almost completely impossible and is made even more difficult by manufacturers listing the sodium rather than the salt content in their products. To calculate how much salt that equals, consumers have to multiply the sodium level by 2.5 and then multiply or divide that number by the number of grams they have consumed. Hardly advanced maths, granted, but still an equation which is unlikely to be done by many time-pressed, mathematically challenged shoppers.

• Organic food fight

  January 30, 2008 @ 4:25 pm | by Conor Pope

  There is a conference focusing on organic food on in Dublin today and some of the news coming out of it is of interest. A survey from the Food Safety Authority of Ireland and Safefood, the Food Safety Promotion Board published at the conference found that less than a third of Irish people think organic food is healthier than its non-organic equivalent and less than a fifth found it to be “full of flavour and taste” as advocates routinely claim it is. It also found that more than half of Irish consumers have never purchased organic food with cost being cited as the main reason people had not even tasted it.
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• High Times

  January 24, 2008 @ 4:31 pm | by Conor Pope

  Opening the paper this morning made for depressing reading. Hardly a page went by without some story or another warning of dramatic price hikes catching my eye. First there was the Ryanair story which I mentioned yesterday. Then there was the news that the price of milk has increased dramatically – by around 12 cent a litre, in fact – over the last couple of weeks as retailers passed on “soaring” costs on to the consumer. “Glanbia carried these costs for many months which have now been passed on to ensure that margins return to sustainable levels,” a Glanbia spokesman said adding that the price rises were a “measured response” to unprecedented cost increases. And then there was the head of the ESB warning that price increases could be expected too. We can look forward to higher electricity bills as part of a new (and probably quite wise) policy of linking domestic prices more closely to the cost of producing electricity. “The big issue is how we get people to reduce their demand by 20 per cent. Overall, bills will not increase if this target is met,” said CEO Padraig McManus.

• What are you calling chicken?

  January 10, 2008 @ 11:24 am | by Conor Pope

  Channel 4 are running an excellent series on food production which this week is shining the spotlight on the darkest corners of the chicken production industry. The intensively farmed chickens spend the 39 days it takes to bring them from egg to slaughter without ever seeing daylight, jammed into tiny spaces – 17 birds to one square metre – wallowing in blood and bird shit and the withered limbs of their fellow chickens who have died along the road. It’s all pretty disgusting. “If consumers knew what it took to produce chickens so cheaply I think they would refuse to eat it,” the host of the series and River Cottage owner Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall said. I wonder is that true? What is more important: the price you pay or whether the chicken you eat has been ethically raised? And would you be willing to pay an additional 20 or 30 per cent to ensure that the practice of intensive farming died out?

• Chicken confusion

  November 28, 2007 @ 12:21 am | by Conor Pope

  A reader from Dublin 3 recently bought an organic chicken in Marks & Spencer; while it was absolutely fine, paying for it left a bitter taste in her mouth because of what she calls its “blatantly misleading” price tag. The chicken in question had a large red label on the packaging proudly announcing that there was 25 per cent off per kg; underneath the outsized red sticker, in finer print, shoppers were advised to “see price ticket for details” The price ticket had the usual use by date, weight and price which was €9.36.

  “At the till I was charged the €9.36,” writes our reader. “I queried this with a staff member, who said that the reduction was already included in the price.” She reasoned that “then there wasn’t 25 per cent off the price as stated; he agreed that it was misleading but that was the way it came in to them and there was nothing he could or would do for me. I went ahead with the purchase, as how else do you really complain about these things?

  “Surely this is blatantly misleading: there is no 25 per cent off the stated item. A number of people came up to me on the way out and said they had similar incidents with M&S and got nowhere either,” she says.

  We contacted the store ourselves to find out more and received the following statement: “The product was reduced from €9.99 per kilo to €7.49, ie less 25 per cent. The product had a shelf ticket stating that reduction with a slash ticket. Whole chickens are a catch weight line, therefore the customer pays for the weight of the chicken multiplied by the price per kilo.

  “M&S don’t show a slash price on each individual product as they are all different weights but they do on the shelf ticket. The price on the chicken is the total price the customer pays, which is calculated on the actual chicken weight multiplied by the discounted price per kilo.” Hmmm.

  The response was almost as confusing to Pricewatch as the in-store labelling was to our reader and did not address at all the central complaint she was making, which was that having a large red 25 per cent off sticker emblazoned on the packaging has the potential to, at the very least, create the impression amongst shoppers not inclined to study the fine print on the shelf ticket that there is 25 per cent off the marked price of the item.

  We contacted the store seeking further clarification but no one was available to elaborate on the original response.

• Organic – is it worth it?

  November 12, 2007 @ 4:04 pm | by Conor Pope

  The benefits of organic food have long been disputed, with advocates claiming that not only does it taste better, but it is better for you, and better for the environment. This, they claim makes its higher price – at least 20 per cent more expensive than non-organic food – more palatable.

  For their part, disbelievers say that a huge question mark still hangs over organically grown foods, with some sceptics going so far as to suggest the whole concept is little more than a fad for people with more money than sense.

  The organic movement received a significant boost at the end of last month with reports of a major study appearing to go some way towards proving that food grown to organic standards is more nutritious than food grown using chemicals and pesticides.
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