Wednesday 1 April 2015

Home brands taking over.



It's Steve's birthday tomorrow and as it's hardly biscuit baking weather, I thought I'd spoil him with a Christmas cake for his celebration cake cos the one I made for Christmas was a really big hit. Yeh I think it was his all time favourite.

The list of ingredients is pretty long, but as I have never been known to follow a recipe, I totalled up the weight of 'stuff' and made it up. I know he likes lots of glace cherries so they were big on my shopping.

All the bits I needed were laid out and I set to making a drunken mess of the fruit, after I had weighed it up. I tipped in one bag of cherries and then another. I am not sure what made me look at 'em. Perhaps shit cherry identification is my super power, but look I did and ooooh YUKKY. I picked 'em out, and opened the next bag and just went the plop. Oooh Yuk, shithouse as well!! I opened the third lot and had a little look in - yep it was shit too.

About 10 bucks worth!! All Woolies home brand. Whatever happened to Big Sister Glace Cherries?
Priced out of the market I reckon.

So in the very ordinary rather ugly bag you can find some cherries - 60% ONLY and 40% of other crap, processed somewhere in Thailand using 'imported products' It's getting to a point where you have to schedule label reading time into the already shitful job of trawling the aisles. Woe be tide those doing it all online cos there is no label dissection possible.

So because his golf was well and truly rained out, Steve took 'em all back. He'd done a reccie and found that the crap ones were all from the same batch, and did Woolies a favour by taking all the other shit ones off the shelves.

They gave a refund and would have given 3 new packets as a bonus except that there was only 1 which was not rooted.

The trouble is that I reckon most people would not bother taking their solo purchase back. Returning stuff is rarely cost effective if you have to make a special trip, as it was for a tenner it took Steve about 3/4 of an hour and a good slurp of petrol.

Those loons who only eat already dead fruit and veg might actually be onto something after all. At least they know where stuff has come from and if it's a bit mouldy they can cut off the bad bit without having to wonder if the whole thing is contaminated by some hands dipped in shit and bum squirt.

The Nanna's frozen fruit gave me the shits literally, the worst case in my life! Thank god for hepatitis immunisation in the 90's.

I like food. I like to eat. I don't like to cook, but I will cos I like to eat. But what I really don't like is to have to stand in the supermarket aisles doing a forensic investigation before tossing stuff into the wonky trolley.

Surely before the superMs force brands off the shelves to replace them with Homebrands, they aught to ensure that there manufacturing process is clean and safe and follows some stringent fail safe procedures.

Or perhaps we the consumers should start questioning just always going for the cheap grab. Maybe it's time to recognise that you get what you pay for. For just a little more we can get a better product with a known pedigree.

And wouldn't it be cool not to have to wear your granny specs, cos the labels are clear and big enough cos the manufacturers are proud of their product.


Yeh I'm Dreaming!






No comments:

Post a Comment