profits up, food intake down

Sainsburys had a 5 minute free advert on the Today programme last week. Peak time. Justin Webb was enamoured, mmm-ing and aagh-ing and popping a few dummy questions to the CEO (Justin King), but mostly leaving him to stray over the high quality of sainsbury products, expanding profits, the uniqueness of the Sainsbury service, how they were doing the right thing for customers, responding to their needs, helping them with their weekly budgets. And to plug the new Sainsbury campaign: live well for less (twice).

"It's very interesting talking to you" says Webb, "you get a sense that you are preparing yourelf and your business for a really very different longer term situation when it comes to the decisions that shoppers make..."

A longer term situation where people can't afford to shop. Or eat.

"Keith Harrold of Project 5000 in Loughborough, which runs a hot food service once a week from a local church, agrees. "People are struggling. Supermarket prices are shooting up and they aren't coping."

"[Fairshare] works from 17 sites in the UK and shifts 3,600 tonnes of food a year, worth more than £8m. In the past 12 months the number of people it feeds has risen from 29,000 to 35,500. The number of organisations signed up to receive food has risen from 600 to 700. And 42% of those organisations are recording increases of up to 50% in demand for their services.

John Willetts, a former NHS trust chief executive and now the volunteer project director for FareShare in Leicester, said: "It's a constant ramping up in demand all the time. The volume of food we're distributing has risen from 41 tonnes a year three years ago to 98 tonnes now, and that's to the same number of organisations."

From http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/oct/01/families-queue-for-food-ha...

Listen to Webb at http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9607000/9607794.stm