Know Where Your Produce Comes at Foodstuffs

NEWS RELEASE
10th AUGUST 2007

Know Where Your Produce Comes from When Shopping at Foodstuffs Supermarkets

Foodstuffs is introducing country of origin information for all the fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and seafood sold in its PAK’nSAVE, New World, Write Price, Shoprite supermarkets and Four Square stores throughout the country.

Foodstuffs (NZ) Limited executive manager Melissa Hodd says the decision comes from the group’s wish to respond positively to increased consumer interest about the origin of food as a result of recent international food scares.

“There’s been a huge amount of public interest in this, and we’ve heard what people are saying. We want to be able to assist our customers to make better- informed decisions when they shop in our stores,” she says.

“We’re asking our suppliers to provide the country of origin information to us, and we will be working through this over the next few months.”

She says they also need to put internal systems in place to ensure the information provided to customers is robust, and anticipates the policy will be fully implemented by December.

ENDS

Foodstuffs Q&A re country of origin information 10.8.07

1. Why are you doing this?
Our customers have been asking for it, and we pride ourselves on listening to our customers.

2. Why haven’t you done it before?
Legally we’re not required to do this, so we don’t always receive this information from suppliers. However, when we do receive it, we generally declare it in our stores. In future, we will be asking our suppliers to provide the information for all fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and seafood.

3. Are you doing this in response to the Greens’ petition?
No, we have already been providing the information for some fruit and vegetables and we are to extend this to all fresh fruit and vegetables as well as fresh meat and seafood in response to public demand, not one political party’s petition.

4. Why is it going to take until the end of the year before it’s fully implemented – don’t you know where your produce comes from?
Yes, we do know where our produce comes from. But we deal with myriad suppliers, and it is an involved process ensuring we achieve accuracy in the information we provide our customers.

5. Why are you restricting it to fresh foods?
It is relatively straightforward to declare the country of origin for one single ingredient. Processed food, involving more than one ingredient, is much more complex and it would difficult and expensive to produce labels for this. For example, tinned fruit salad: it may contain NZ peaches 70% of the time, but when the supplier cannot source sufficient NZ peaches, they are forced to import to meet demand. That would involve changing the packaging and the label, which is a time-consuming and extremely costly process.

6. Is this a food safety move?
Not at all. This is solely aimed at providing customers with more information on the origin of the produce they buy. We operate extremely stringent food safety standards and already go above and beyond the current legal requirements.

7. Why do you import produce at all?
We want to provide our customers with both range and choice. If we didn’t import produce, items such as bananas, mangoes, pineapple and California oranges would be unobtainable in our supermarkets.

8. Isn’t the NZ produce good enough?
We always look to supply NZ produce, but there are times when it’s simply not feasible. Customers want to be able to buy these products year-round, and by importing to meet the seasonal shortfall in the NZ market (for example, oranges) means we can meet our customers’ demands.

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