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| Prince Charles sacked by Sainsbury's
Felicity Lawrence
Tuesday June 26, 2007
The Guardian
Prince Charles, whose Highgrove Farm has been dropped as a vegetable
supplier to Sainsbury’s. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty images
Sainsbury's has dropped the Prince of Wales and the head of the Soil
Association as vegetable suppliers because it says their produce did
not meet the right standards, the Guardian can reveal.
The move has prompted the director of the organic food and farming
charity, Patrick Holden, to accuse leading supermarkets of being so
centralised and industrialised that they cannot deliver the local,
organic food their customers want.
Mr Holden told the Guardian he believes that he and Prince Charles
have become victims of the supermarket system's industrial processes
and imposed food miles. They were sacked as suppliers of carrots to
Sainsbury's at the end of January.
He and the prince had been forced to truck their vegetables hundreds
of miles from their farms to a centralised packhouse in East Anglia
before they were sent back to be sold in Sainsbury's stores local to
their area.
Mr Holden believes his vegetables were of the highest quality when
harvested, but the combined effects of long-distance transport,
handling to create large enough batches for the machines that wash and
polish the vegetables and further storing after processing to create
large enough batches for packing left the vegetables damaged and prone
to rot.
The system also resulted in a crop that had been grown for low
environmental impact acquiring a greater carbon footprint than
conventional carrots grown on an industrial scale, according to Mr
Holden. Up to half the crop from the two farms was being rejected in
the grading for cosmetic appearance and quality.
Mr Holden said he had decided to speak out because his case was
typical. "Everyone who has supplied a supermarket own label will have
a story similar to mine to tell but most daren't tell it for fear of
being delisted. This is not confined to one supermarket. It is the
unintentional consequence of the centralised supermarket distribution
system."
Sainsbury's acknowledges that dealing with small suppliers is
difficult for big supermarkets, but says it works successfully with
others and is willing to try to find a solution to the problems of its
highest profile organic farmers. It said its overriding concern had to
be the quality of the food it sold.
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