The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s crackdown on Coles for misleading shoppers about its in-store baking credentials is, from the outside, spot on.
The Watchdog section in AdNews back in March probed the grocery chain on this very subject by asking its consumer enquiry hotline how labels on Coles pastries said they were proudly ‘Baked in Store’ while the fine print said they were ‘Made in Belgium’. Huh?
The call centre operator was pleasant and helpful enough but admitted the retailer got a lot of calls from customers claiming it was misleading and that they were confused – how can a croissant or escargot be baked in store if it’s made in Belgium?
“The way it works is that they are made in Belgium,” the Coles call centre woman said. “The dough is frozen, shipped over to Australia and then fully cooked in store. A lot of customers call and say it’s misleading but basically the reason why we do it is because not all stores have a full bakery – we don’t have the room.”
The acknowledgement by the Coles call centre operator that the grocery chain fields plenty of confused enquiries about the misleading nature of the on-pack labels flies in the face of Coles’ response yesterday to the ACCC’s legal stoush in the Federal Court.
Coles is reportedly “perplexed” by the ACCC’s case but really, if we strip out semantics, this is a smart ploy by the retailer to develop a customer perception that Coles is doing local and fresh in a big credible way. It’s deliberately blurring the lines of public perception in the same way that the only advertising you see from Coles – and Woolworths, by the way – is their fresh food and Australian grower focus. It’s what the creative folks in our industry call ‘creative licence’.
First, if Coles and Woolworths could ship in rockmelon from Barbados cheaper and at a greater margin, they would not think twice. Bugger local produce if profits are fatter from offshore. That’s business, certainly, and it’s exactly what we’re seeing with both supermarkets’ private label programs. Huge licks of their packaged food ranges are imported, although there’s nothing in the advertising here about great quality canned slurp from Indonesia or Poland.
Yes, the onus is on the consumer to read the labelling and make informed choices but wouldn’t it be great to see Coles tell it like it is: this product is imported but it’s much cheaper so we flicked the Australian alternative.
But back to the bakery. As we are now discovering, courtesy of an official complaint to the ACCC by former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett, the practice of airlifting par-baked bread lines and re-heating in an in-store oven is widespread across the supermarket sector. And it’s massive business for the European suppliers. Most of Metcash-owned IGA’s fresh-baked bread is delivered frozen from a baker in Zurich which also supplies 800 other retailers and food service companies in Australia.
The point in all this is it takes plenty of effort for an individual to get to the bottom of the fuzzy messaging and it shows the ‘customer-first’ mantra being increasingly espoused by most consumer-facing companies has a long, long way to go. Really.
This article first appeared in the 14 June 2013 edition of AdNews, in print and on iPad. Click here to subscribe for more news, features and opinion.
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