/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/66387742/4000.0.jpg)
Supermarket’s bread lines are getting shorter
Retail giant Tesco will make over 1,800 in-store bakery staff redundant because, it says, customers just want to buy pre-packed bagels instead. The change in baking volume, which will start from May according to the Guardian, happens in the context of several significant rounds of job cuts. Tesco closed almost 90 fresh food counters last year — at the cost of 9,000 jobs — and cut 4,500 more last August after diagnosing its smaller, Metro stores as not suitable for customers’ weekly shops in 2019. While the company attributes the bakery decision to changing customer habits — with a strangely specific focus on bagels and wraps outpacing bakery bread — retail analyst GlobalData says that its proximity to past rounds of cuts suggests that “the move is likely more as a result of yet another bid to reduce operating costs and protect margins in the face of greater competition from the discounters Aldi and Lidl.” [Guardian]
And in other news...
- Where to slurp down London’s best oysters.
- Ikea confirms vegan meatballs — “plant balls” — will arrive in European stores this August. [The Verge]
- Luscious langoustines, a pig skin curry, penne from the past, and all the other best dishes Eater writers ate this week.
- MP Jacob Rees-Mogg’s crisp opinions do not mask the fact that he is one of the worst politicians in the country.
- Clerkenwell’s best restaurants include quality chops, quality wines, quality coffee, quality Vietnamese lunch, quality gyros...
- Camden restaurant The Cheese Bar will add a Paddington cheese barge to its Seven Dials cheese counter. [Big Hospitality]
- Market Halls food hall chief executive Andy Lewis-Pratt has said that it “expects” churn at its Fulham, Victoria, and Oxford Street locations, and that “if you go for someone with a new idea, they’re not all going to work. The difference is if it fails no one lost a lot of money.” What this doesn’t necessarily take into account is that a loss is still a loss and a lot of money means different things to different people, especially small business owners. [Big Hospitality]
- Good tweet:
If you have to drain your pot of rice, you don't know how to make rice correctly pic.twitter.com/xbdiVJub97
— The Professor (@AfricanDynasty3) February 24, 2020