There’s an interview with Andy Clarke in today’s edition of The Times (lurking behind its online paywall, unfortunately).

After some discussion of Asda’s moral victory over Tesco in the Price Guarantees stakes, Clarke gets back to banging on an increasingly familiar drum: his supermarket’s new-found focus on quality.

“Pricing will always be the cornerstone of our business,” he says. “But now we’re moving on.” He recognises that it’ll take time to win people over with that message.

“We’ve had 20 years of price history and our change of emphasis on food has really been in the past 12 months. Are people who haven’t shopped at Asda in a while going to say suddenly Asda has got great-quality food? It’s going to take time to reinforce those messages but customers are beginning to recognise it.”

Anyone who shops at Asda will be used to seeing the name of this publication displayed near the checkouts, as Asda parades its perennial title as cheapest supermarket in the Grocer 33.

Now the supermarket can also talk about the seven golds it won in our 2011 Own-Label Food & Drink Awards, held last week. You can read a full report on the awards and winners here.

Asda, with 52 finalists, still lagged Tesco – with 11 golds from 59 finalists. And both, not surprisingly, trailed Sainsbury’s, which landed a dozen top spots from far fewer finalists. Still, as Clarke says in today’s interview, it’s all a learning curve for Asda – and for Clarke himself, in the wake of what some observers inevitably dubbed his ‘Ratner moment’.

“I was a couple of months into the job,” he says. “It was interesting [to see] how people can interpret what you mean. It was certainly true that we needed to move our emphasis on from just about price but yeah, some of those comments were taken out of context.”

Just as with Chosen By You, Clarke is probably choosing his words a little more carefully these days too.

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