UK gardening - Sainsbury's giant carrot washer, and the rejected royal roots. Soil Assoc get the hump over Sainsbu

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Sainsbury's giant carrot washer, and the rejected royal roots. Soil Assoc get the hump over Sainsbu

Polly

2007-06-26, 3:25 am

Sainsbury's giant carrot washer, and the rejected royal roots

How the mass market for 'local' produce sidelined a leading organic
farmer and the Prince of Wales

Felicity Lawrence
Tuesday June 26, 2007
The Guardian

They were unfortunate suppliers to sack: Prince Charles's Highgrove
farm and the head of the leading organic food and farming charity, but
Sainsbury's did it anyway, and without notice. And while it was about
it, it fined the director of the Soil Association, Patrick Holden,
£3,380 plus VAT through his account manager, for delivering a load of
carrots that its quality control system rejected.
The saga of Mr Holden's vegetables and the rejected royal roots
involves thousands of food miles, tonnes of carbon emissions, enormous
waste and a giant washing machine, designed to wash and polish carrots
so that "when displayed on the supermarket shelf, even weeks after
washing, they still look like wet, fresh carrots". According to Mr
Holden, who has spoken exclusively to the Guardian, it is a saga that
shows that the supermarkets' current structures cannot deliver
sustainable food, whatever they may claim. Sainsbury's says its
customers and quality are the final arbiters.

Sainsbury's has made buying local a key part of its recent marketing
to eco-conscious customers. Mr Holden claims that in fact the
supermarkets are unintentionally making it impossible for the kind of
small family farms their customers imagine are behind their organic
labels to supply them. "Supermarkets are preaching localism but it's
just tokenism, their systems are still going in the opposite
direction, and it's disastrous," he said.
A carrot grower for more than 20 years, Mr Holden had been supplying
organic carrots from his farm in west Wales to Sainsbury's to be sold
locally.

The carrots were packed in bags that told the story of his family farm
Bwlchwernen Fawr. He had switched to marketing them as his special own
brand after the price paid by the supermarkets for organic carrots
fell below the cost of production. " They were more expensive, but
people were prepared to pay for something they trusted was local, he
said. At first the carrots were packed at packhouses owned by Organic
Farm Foods, either nearby in Lampeter or across the border in
Leominster, Herefordshire, before being returned to stores around his
farm. The Highgrove carrots were also sent to Leominster.

However Organic Farm Foods (OFF) was forced to close its packhouses
when another supermarket group, Waitrose, delisted it as a supplier.
The owner, Peter Segger, had been the main pioneer of organic food in
supermarkets through the 1990s. He had invested several million pounds
building the packhouse to meet supermarket requirements. But Waitrose
decided to rationalise its supply in the early 2000s and wanted a
smaller number of "category managers" to organise supplies all around
the country. Its carrot contract was awarded to a company in the east
of England. OFF became a casualty.

Mr Holden and Highgrove were then forced to send their carrots to a
Sainsbury's superpacker in East Anglia, in Mr Holden's case trucking
them 230 miles. The two farms tried to combine loads to reduce costs
and emissions. The superpacker in Peterborough was not geared to
dealing with small consignments. Mr Holden's carrots had to be tipped
into larger containers for washing, damaging up to 15% of the crop, he
says.

The Wyma Vege-Polisher boasts on its website that it can improve the
look and yield of carrots, potatoes and other roots. It removes the
surface membrane and polishes carrots to a "deep glow" so they look
fresh and wet weeks later. Potatoes have their skins "lightened up"
and skin fungi or sprouting caused by storage removed.

After grading for cosmetic standards, Mr Holden's and Highgrove's
carrots were suffering further losses, with up to half the total crop
being graded out, according to Mr Holden. Because they could only be
packed once large enough batches had accumulated after washing, the
carrots were also becoming prone to small patches of rot. Mr Holden
found himself delisted, even though he believes the crop he harvested
was of the highest quality.

Mr Holden said: "Everyone who has supplied a supermarket own label
will have a story similar to mine to tell, but most daren't tell it.
This is not confined to one supermarket - Sainsbury's have in fact
been more supportive of organic farming than some others."

By the end, his vegetables ended up with a larger carbon footprint
than conventional carrots. "We need a complete reversal of the 30-year
process that has dismantled the lattice work of small local supply
chains. The current supermarket practice is still driving towards
greater centralisation, which is completely at odds with Britain's
food security and long-term public interest," he told us.

A spokeswoman for Prince Charles said that Highgrove's Home Farm "was
involved in a short trial with Sainsbury's to sell organic carrots,
which both sides have agreed needs more work".

Sainsbury's said in a statement: "We are totally committed to organic
products and are proud of the work we do in partnership with our
suppliers, many of whom are small and family-run farms. We have gone
to great lengths to try to accommodate Mr Holden's preferred way of
supplying us with his carrots. Our overriding priority is to provide
our customers with high quality produce, and our organic carrots need
to be as fresh as possible. We will continue to work to find a
solution for him."

The Guardian has found other examples of supermarkets claiming to
support local organic production while falling back on centralised
distribution and imports.

Organic carrots bought recently at Waitrose carry a picture of Peter
Cornish, one of its "carefully selected growers", on the back of the
pack, but in small print on the front the carrots' country of origin
is listed as Italy. A bag of parsnips with the story on the back of
organic English parsnips as grown by Andrew Nottage, who has won
community awards for biodiversity, is sourced in Scotland. The story
of watercress grown by the sparkling chalk streams of Hampshire
accompanies a product imported from Portugal.

Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University, London, agrees
that the current structure of supermarket systems makes it impossible
to deliver on their rhetoric of local food. "They are locked in to a
trucking and packing system that they have invested millions in over
the last 30 years. They would have to reinvest dramatically - moving
from a few regional distribution centres to hundreds of more local
ones for example - to become really local."

Commenting on its packaging, Waitrose said: "The purpose of these
images was to give customers a flavour of the people who grow our
fruit and vegetables rather than to show the country of origin.
Waitrose is genuinely committed to British, local and regional
produce." Following our call the company said that in future the
pictures of growers on its packs would be consistent with the
products' country of origin.

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