Sunday 16 October 2016

my mate marmite

Though it seems we have narrowly averted what could only be described as Marmageddon with the one of the main grocery chains in the UK and a major, multi-national food producer having reached a compromise on the pricing regimes of its suite of brands after an unstable currency and costs fluctuations threatened to make the country’s beloved (or reviled) breakfast-spread a little harder to obtain, the bigger and mostly unseen problem of overhead, profit-margins, product-placement and price-controls still remain.
Consumers and smaller producers without the leverage (because it’s Unilever, you see) of these titans are still not off the hook. Of course, such dealings are happening all the time and could have occurred regardless of the Brexit outcome—but that contentious milieu only made the negotiations or bullying visible—and the industry turns on the subsidies of Milk Trusts and Egg Councils and the greased recommendations that favour processed foods over more wholesome ones without the influence of vertical monopolies. What do you think? I’ll bet that this isn’t the last spat in the supermarket aisles.