Jim Padfield of Essex potato grower H Padfield & Sons highlights the overlooked impact of the major multiples’ 4p veg promotions on the wholesale and foodservice sectors
It’s a Sunday evening, two weeks after Easter, and the weekly invoices sit ready for emailing out to our 30 customers.
This is the final task of the work started on our 2025 harvested crop, which began back in August 2024.
As potato growers and packers, we serve wholesalers, high street retailers, and catering. Most of our customers have been with us for over a decade, and virtually all are family businesses.
They rely on us to grow, store, wash, pack and deliver the right product at the right price so that we can all make a living.
But this particular Sunday’s invoices are much reduced, while some are missing altogether. This is because we, and our customers, have had our week’s business snatched by the supermarkets.
Over the top, you might say, but independent farmers have suffered this Easter as their customers are seduced away by several supermarkets’ 4p Easter veg prices.
Produce take many months to grow, and many more to store, by a farmer who often has no other market. Those farmers, wholesalers, independent retailers, markets and caterers who supply outside of the retail sector are the forgotten victims of these price wars. In the end, nobody wins.
This country has shut its eyes and blocked its ears to the slow degradation of British farming, of the land, the infrastructure, and real farming people. Food can be produced for less than its cost for a while, but not forever.
The supermarkets are not the only problem in farming, but they should never be allowed total free reign. France’s ‘EGalim law’, introduced in 2018, was designed to prevent supermarkets from selling below the cost of production and to address the imbalance of power between farmers, food processors, and large retailers. Selling at a loss is now legally forbidden. And ‘buy one, get one free’ deals are effectively banned.
Reading back what I have written, I am reminded of John F Kennedy’s quote describing farmers as the only people who “buy everything at retail, sell everything at wholesale, and pay the freight both ways”.
It has been a thin week, but we will survive, as luckily, I still have one of those half-price Tesco Easter legs of lamb in the deep freeze. Better keep that quiet from my butcher, coming in this morning for his load of spuds, wondering why he hasn’t had his usual meat order.
