In the midst of increasing pressure on household budgets and mounting food costs, M&S has announced a raft of price decreases on 60 lines – including everyday essentials like bread, milk, bananas, beef mince and spaghetti.

Co-COO and Food MD Stuart Machin told customers M&S was reducing prices within its Remarksable range and focusing on the products shopped most frequently, “all benchmarked against our key competitors”. But how significant is this really?

The answer is pretty significant. Often rounds of supermarket price cuts need to be taken with a pinch of salt. Either the reductions are not that impactful, or the term “everyday essential” is stretched to the limit of its credibility.

However, in the case of M&S, these seem like genuinely meaningful cuts on everyday key grocery lines. Here are some examples: M&S Select Farms semi-skimmed milk four-pints was £1.20, and is now £1.15. Its white sliced bread 800g was 65p, and is now 60p. The price of its Italian spaghetti 500g line dropped from 75p to 70p. And a kilo of bananas is now 78p versus 82p previously.

It means an M&S loaf of bread now costs the same as its equivalent in Sainsbury’s and Tesco, and is only 1p more expensive than Morrisons and Asda. The £1.15 price tag of its semi-skimmed milk means it is actually cheaper than many of the other major mults on this item, after they upped milk prices earlier this month [Assosia].

Furthermore, by slashing its beef mince from £3.20 to £3, M&S is now cheaper than Asda’s Butcher Selection Lean Beef Mince 5% (£3.10). It is on par with Sainsbury’s beef mince, which is also £3, and only 1p more expensive than the rest of its rivals – including the discounters. By contrast, Morrisons has actually upped the price of its 500g beef mince price from £2.79 to £2.99 since 1 February [Assosia].

Admittedly, M&S was charging far more than its rivals on some of these items – for example, a 500g pack of M&S beef mince sold for £3.95 on its online partner Ocado in February this year. Shoppers could easily go to Tesco.com and get a 750g pack for just 4p more. Which means M&S had more wiggle room to cut prices.

Plus, it seems the benefits haven’t extended to online customers. Because M&S on Ocado prices are set independently, items that are subject to price cuts in-store are still quite expensive online. At the time of writing, the beef mince was still retailing at £3.95 on Ocado.

But it’s hard to argue with the rationale of the move. After all, M&S was working hard to dispel its costly reputation well before the cost of living crisis hit home. Machin himself said the company’s £100m investment in value over the past three years “has been working” as customer perception is “stronger than ever”. At a time when every penny matters – inflation hit a new 30-year high in January and food costs are expected to rise further due to the conflict in Ukraine – now is the right moment to cement those efforts.

As value becomes ever more of a priority for UK shoppers, it may not be enough to keep M&S growing at a faster rate than the discounters [NielsenIQ 4 w/e 26 March 2022]. But it may well go some way to cementing the retailer as a genuine competitor on price.

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