All articles by Liz Hamson – Page 10
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Comment & OpinionCritical Eye... on Gordon Ramsay, the new Mrs Doubtfire
Now, I appreciate that my eyesight would not be 20:20 without strong contact lenses. But surely I'm not the only one who thinks facial prosthetics are about as convincing as shoving a paper bag over your head and drawing a face on. Or am...
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News
Critical Eye... on wittering Whittingstall, the seasonal crusader
I’m not going to beat about the bush, I’ve always disliked Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall – posh, earnest types have never been my cup of tea – and my tolerance was tested to the limit with the return of River Cottage last week (8pm, Channel 4, 16...
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News
Critical Eye... on insane wine making
I’m quite partial to the odd bottle – er, glass – of red wine and have offended many with my predilection for mixing even the good stuff with Coke. (It’s called a Kalimocho and I nearly got chucked out of a tapas bar in Granada for having the...
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Comment & Opinion
Editor's Comment: Grocery will not be immune to the credit crunch
The received wisdom is that in a recession, people cut back on discretionary spend – no more plasma TVs, fancy holidays, new cars. As far as food and drink goes, they may shop smarter, but they don’t reduce their outlay significantly – indeed,...
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Comment & Opinion
Critical Eye... on the Ministry of Food
Damn. I really wanted to hate Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food (9pm, Channel 4, Tuesday 30 September). I was sure he had lost his mojo after the Jamie at Home series featured him cooking pizza in his outdoor woodchip oven – as you do, and all that...
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Comment & Opinion
Critical Eye... on dodgy prawns and amiable toffs
Wow. What a week. En route from holiday in south-west France and following a motorway blowout (just two weeks after I’d had a full set of tyres fitted… grrr), I was actually looking forward to getting home at the weekend. Not only had I spent…
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Comment & Opinion
Critical Eye... on the deadly truth about fishing
Fed up with the rising price of food? Spare a thought for the men who risk their lives to bring it to our tables – often for peanuts. If any occupation exposes the triviality of our daily anxieties, it must surely be that of the fisherman. Last...
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Profiles
Giant killer
Straight-talking retail anthropologist Paco Underhill gives a frank appraisal of the UK grocery market to Liz Hamso
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News
Critical Eye... on hairy bakers and disgusting foods
Delighted as I was when Saint Jamie found a fellow do-gooder in Hugh Fearnley Whine-about-it-all with whom to expound on the evils of intensively reared chicken, I quite like celebrity chefs to do a bit of cooking once in a while. Which is why I am...
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News
Hot Topic: What are the odds on Andy Bond taking over from the 'Mugabe of retail'?
A Rose by any other name would smell sweeter. Or so 22% of M&S shareholders seem to think.
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News
The price of sustainability
The annual jamboree that is the CIES World Food Business Summit is usually a pretty boisterous affair. Not this year. At last week's Growth and Sustainability-themed event in Munich, it was as though someone had been told they'd got a...
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News
Eat... or be eaten
The credit crunch may have put the kibosh on the big private equity deals in UK food and drink, but it hasn't reduced the number of mergers and acquisitions - or business failures. Rather the reverse, reveals new research. The figures in...
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News
Carrefour: out with the old world, in with the new
Not so long ago the foundations of Carrefour's empire were looking shaky. French consumers were abandoning its hypermarkets in favour of discount chains and things weren't going so well overseas either. Like Wal-Mart, the French retailing giant...
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News
Why food scares have got a whole lot scarier
At around 8pm on Monday 13 August, Marc Bolland was called back to the office. The news was serious. There had been an E.coli outbreak in Scotland and two Morrisons stores were under suspicion. His team swiftly swung into action, firing off...
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News
Asda chiefs take action to improve stock availability
Asda has introduced measures to improve availability, after admitting levels fell in 2006 due to poor planning over the summer and a switch from bogofs to other types of promotion. This week, general store managers did their first week on...
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News
Private equity's hunger growing
Private equity groups have helped drive the value of M&A activity in the European food and drink manufacturing sector to £8.3bn in the first three months of this year - exceeding already the figure for the whole of 2006. In the first two...
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News
Are there lights at the end of the tunnel?
What a mess! Over the last fortnight, the press has been awash with stories about the labelling "war" between the FSA's government-endorsed traffic-light labelling scheme and the FDF's front-of-pack GDAs. Whether the two camps really are...
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News
The people's planopoly
The battle lines have been drawn. On one side are Friends of the Earth, local community groups and small independent retailers. They accuse Tesco et al of: browbeating local authorities with "legalised bungs" (aka planning gains); submitting...
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News
Online battle intensifies as Asda ramps up coverage
The battle for the online pound is on. This week, Asda disclosed details of its online rollout, first revealed in The Grocer in September, just days after Tesco announced plans to launch an online clothing trial parallel to its non food site,...
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News
To advertise or not to advertise...
TV food and drink advertising is in limbo. With just weeks to go until Ofcom delivers the results of its investigation into advertising to children, many manufacturers are holding fire on ad campaigns for fear they will fall foul of the proposed...