I’ve lost count of the number of programmes promising to reveal the ‘secrets of the supermarkets’, and that wasn’t the only sense of déjà vu about Gregg Wallace’s latest offering, Autumn’s supermarket Secrets (9pm, BBC1, 30 October).
Take Sainsbury’s drive to sell more British-grown apples. While it was interesting to see its revolutionary new growing system in Kent (aka tall, skinny trees), we’d seen how they are stored for months in a low-oxygen cold room on the dreadful Food Unwrapped (and I really didn’t need those bad memories brought back).
It didn’t help that despite references to ‘the recent horsemeat scandal’, chunks of it were clearly filmed last year - notably Tesco’s run-up to a pumpkin-tastic Halloween and Sainsbury’s launch of Norfolk Black chicken. And I was very disorientated when Neil Court-Johnston showed us the difference between own-label and branded pies at Pooles Pies (it’s had quite a tumultuous time of it lately given the company went into administration and was sold to Country Style Foods in August).
All this (and the fact it was about half an hour too long) aside, the programme did shed some light on supermarket secrets for your average viewer. Even industry experts would have found the journey from farm to shelf of Sainsbury’s new chicken variety insightful (if not as emotional as a tearful Judith Batchelar). And pleasingly, Wallace seemed genuinely interested in how the supermarkets operate.
But a few updates would have been nice - after all, it’s Autumn 2013, not 2012!
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