Telling Us Porkies - May Be?

UK - Supermarkets are masters of persuasion. They use every guile to persuade shoppers to spend more than they need to and they do it by employing well established rules to get most of us to trade up, writes Digby Scott.

In a revealing article for Pig World, he says that while they do offer us choice, they are also experts when it comes down to meeting the needs of the genuinely thrifty, or cash-strapped shopper. For most leading supermarkets, pork falls into six tiers:

• Premium
• Super-premium
• Healthy
• Organic
• Standard-plus
• Standard and value

But supermarkets don’t have so many tiers for their customers benefit, says Mr Scott. More so because their economists tell them its the best means of extracting the most money out of the most people.

A Play on Provenance

They offer expensive goods for those who are not price-sensitive and/or are concerned about provenance etc. The cheaper goods are for those who are price sensitive and don’t care or can’t afford provenance, he says.

"This is why ‘value’ range packaging is so awful. It wouldn't cost supermarkets any more to put their ‘value’ products in attractive packaging, but that would defeat the purpose, which is to deter customers who are willing to pay more," he explains.

According to Scott, imported pigmeat tends to go into ‘value’ and ‘standard’ ranges, while premium ranges are dominated by British pigmeat.

Premium ranges are likely to grow and Scott says that to cash in on this, GB pig producers need to identify pre-farm gate attributes which can be part of the added-value contribution.

View the Pig World story by clicking here.

ThePigSite News Desk

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