NEXT time you go down to your local supermarket, don’t be surprised if you can’t find one of your favourite brands of food.
It seems some popular brands going by the wayside after they are dropped by the supermarket giants in favour of other brands or home brands the supermarkets consider more profitable.
John Jones, the owner of Foodworks Port Macquarie, said he was finding that a product that had been sold in Australia for many years would suddenly become unavailable.
“It must about four months ago a gentleman came in asking if we had PMU sauce,” Mr Jones said. “I said we had. He said he could not buy it anywhere else in town. Then we eventually got notification it was no longer available.
“I rang up the manufacturers to see if there was another source I could obtain the product from and they said they weren’t producing it anymore, which I thought was strange.
“Then a few weeks later the same thing happened with Fountain Chutney, so I decided to ring the manufacturer. The customer service man said they were not producing it anymore and I said that seems stupid and he agreed with me. However, the hierarchy had decided not to produce it anymore.”
Mr Jones did some research and came to the conclusion that the products were disappearing because they had been dropped by Coles and Woolworths, who between then had 70-plus percent of the market share in Australia.
“It seems if one of them decides to discontinue a line, then the manufacturer loses such a great volume of sales that it becomes impractical to produce the product,” he said.
Mr Jones said the supermarkets appeared to be concentrating on fewer brands and also expanding their range of home brands, which was resulting in Australian or New Zealand brands being dropped and replaced with cheaper overseas-made products.
He said the trend obviously did not auger well for Australian producers and workers.
“Maybe it is part of globalisation, using cheaper labour forces, but it just seems wrong these good brands are going,” he said. “Fountain Chutney, for instance, has been produced here for at least 50 years and older Australians have grown up with it.”
Mr Jones had no solution to the problem, other than for consumers to try and patronise home-grown products to make them even more popular and to demand an explanation when a favourite brand disappeared.
