A recent investigation by BBC Panorama has discovered that a number of Tesco products, priced to match their Aldi equivalents, are not identical. The investigation analysed the ingredients of 122 Tesco products, which were found to be price-matched to Aldi, and found that, of these, 38 had five percentage points less of the main ingredient in the Tesco product than the Aldi product, which equated to nearly one third. In the case of Tesco chicken nuggets, the product contained 39% chicken, compared with 60% in the equivalent Aldi product.
Tesco informed the BBC that it continually reviews the quality of its products and all of its price-match products are comparable to Aldi. The retailer also stated that just because there may be a higher proportion of one ingredient, it doesn’t always mean that it is of better quality. Some believe that such findings are an example of “value engineering” where the quantities of ingredients are altered to reduce costs.
Discount supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl have thrived in the growing consumer trend to adapt to the higher cost of living. Tesco is not the only supermarket to offer products priced to meet Aldi’s prices, with Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and ASDA offering similar products. However, Panorama discovered no definitive evidence of a consistent pattern in the differences between the proportions of main ingredients in their products compared with Aldi. Tesco’s price matching is on roughly 700 items out of its 30,000 product lines, and these are usually low-priced, every day goods.
The vast majority of the products Aldi and Lidl sell are own-label. Last year, Giles Hurley, Aldi’s boss in the UK and Ireland, informed the BBC that products sold under a supermarket’s own name now make up more than half of everything shoppers buy, by value. “If you look in volume terms that figure is much bigger and at the moment own-label products are growing at twice the rate of branded goods,” Mr Hurley said
Read the full article from The BBC here: Read More
