Top awards for Private Label wines
At the prestigious International Wine Challenge, own-label wines from British supermarkets proved a big success at this year's competition. Tesco and Marks & Spencer emerged as joint leaders with 62 of their own label wines picking up an award.

M&S took five gold medals. Other supermarket golds went to Asda for its ‘Extra Special’ Australian Riesling 2009 at £7.99, and the Co-op's Chilean Leyda Valley Sauvignon Blanc 2009 also at £7.99

Source: The Guardian, 18 May, www.guardian.co.uk

Auchan makes Bio products more affordable
Auchan has created a range of fifty organic products permanently priced under €1. The objective is to make organic products more affordable to the large public. Under its private label ‘Mieux Vivre Bio’, Auchan offers commonly used products in the dry grocery, dairy and frozen category. The majority of the products are of French origin but some of them come from other EU countries. By boosting their volumes, Auchan expects to improve the margins of these products and to make this project a profitable one.

Source: LSA, 20 May, www.lsa.fr

New themes for Private Label in PLMA Idea Supermarket
This year’s edition of the Idea Supermarket at the PLMA in Amsterdam displayed some interesting new packaging. In view of the economic recession, ‘Eating-out-at-home’ was one of the key themes with products such as Tesco Finest ‘Restaurant Collection’ and Waitrose ‘Menu’. Other themes addressed were Social Responsibility with, for example, Colruyt’s ‘Kwahu’ which financially supports schooling and education projects in South America and South-East Asia, and Provenance with products such as Coop Germany’s ‘Unser Norden’ and Sainsbury’s ‘British Classic’.

Source: IPLC

Questionable quality of budget labels
Full service supermarkets are successfully fighting the hard discounters in Germany. Notably Rewe and Edeka outperformed them with a five percent turnover growth in the first quarter of this year. What is new is that retailers such as Rewe and Tengelmann have uncompromisingly reduced prices of their budget labels to match, or even underbid, the level of hard discount competition. However, the Federation of German Consumer Organisations, the Bundesverband der Verbraucherzentralen (VZBV) observes a downside to this development. The pressure to lower prices even further is compromising the quality of products. In some cases, for example, artificial cheese and ham are used as ingredients. For the production of these imitations, raw materials are used that rarely have anything in common with the food they replace.

Sources: Berliner Zeitung, 10 April, www.berlinonline.de/berliner-zeitung and
Lebensmittelzeitung, 13 May, www.lebensmittelzeitung.net