The Oireachtas Joint Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine last night welcomed pledges made by Irish supermarkets regarding the below cost selling of fruit and vegetables in the run up to Christmas.
Aldi, Lidl, Tesco and the Musgrave Group agreed not to sell the items at a low cost, after last year’s ‘Veg Wars’, where retailers priced fruit and vegetables for mere cents during the festive season.
Chairman of the Committee Andrew Doyle said that the selling of cut-price vegetables before Christmas last year highlighted many of the inequities in the food supply chain.
He said, “As a Committee, we are acutely aware of the pricing pressures that primary producers are regularly subjected to, having published a comprehensive report on the matter in October 2013. The pledge by Aldi, Lidl, Tesco and the Musgrave Group to avoid below cost selling of fruit and vegetables this Christmas is therefore to be warmly welcomed.”
The Committee also said that it would welcome the same pledge from other retailers and would like to extend the pledge to all home-produced fresh products, including poultry.
Doyle added, “There would be no winners, should any retailer take a unilateral decision to run a similar promotional campaign to last Christmas. Consequently, the Committee calls on the remaining supermarket chains to promise not to run such a campaign in the coming weeks.”
© 2014 - Checkout Magazine by Genna Patterson
