Big business acts as a mafia, squeezing suppliers and raising prices for customers
The most entertaining cookbook in my (admittedly inextensive) collection is the Riverford Farm Cook Book — less for its recipes, which tend to be highly virtuous and dominated by vegetables, than for the inspired polemics of Riverford Farm’s Guy Singh-Watson.
In his brief memoir of “My loathing for supermarkets”, Singh-Watson recalls trying to sell produce to one major chain. When invited to a meeting the following Thursday, he asked if they could possibly make it Friday. The phone went dead. “I called back — ‘I’m sorry, I think we were cut off’ — and was met with the buyer’s immortal words: ‘No sonny, when we whistle, you jump.’”
As Singh-Watson recalls, supermarkets can ask almost anything of their suppliers. You might be paid well below the cost of production – only getting the full amount if your stuff sells well over the course of the year. Extra fees can be demanded for the privilege of getting one’s product on the shelf. “I was once asked to pay £1,000 to talk to a consultant who would advise me how to talk to Sainsbury. Does it sound like dealing with the Mafia? It is… One could always say no but, since one of the conditions of business is often that you supply only one or perhaps two of the major
