Asda is ditching its Aldi and Lidl price-match scheme just a year after launching it, as the UK’s fourth-largest supermarket chain battles to win back shoppers amid rising costs.
Stopping the scheme in favour of a wider “Rollback” price cuts campaign is one of the most dramatic moves yet by Asda’s new chair, Allan Leighton, who returned to run Asda late last year more than two decades after quitting as chief executive.
He now wants to take greater control of Asda’s price messaging and not be seen to be “dancing to the tune of the discounters”, according to the Grocer trade journal, which first reported the changes.
Asda is desperate to lift sales and stem a rapid decline in its share of the grocery market. In the final three months of last year, sales dived by 5.8% at the Leeds-based chain, according to analysts at Kantar, making it the only big supermarket to record falling sales in the period.
An Asda spokesperson said: “We’re focused on our own great ‘Asda Prices’ not competitor comparisons. We’ve started 2025 as we mean to go on by cutting prices on thousands of products and there’s much more to come with Rollback.”
The changes come as Simon Roberts, the boss of the UK’s second-largest supermarket, Sainsbury’s, called on the government to link its aims for economic growth to an anticipated food strategy.
Roberts said taking into account efforts to manage farming more sustainably, for example by using anaerobic digesters and other technology to deal with the problem of chicken manure or waste energy to heat greenhouses, should help farms gain planning permission for expansion.
“I feel we have now got a moment to link food strategy with growth in the wider economy and to attract more investment and give confidence to farmers to produce more at home,” he said.
Roberts argued that the food industry had “immense capacity to drive economic growth” and could “ensure the UK had a more sustainable food system – from an economic, environmental and self-sufficiency point of view”.
Speaking at the Sustainable Foods conference in London, Roberts added that there needed to be more collaboration across the industry, including long-term supplier deals from retailers and backing from government that gave farmers confidence to invest.
Roberts criticised the current system as “too siloed and prone to shocks”.
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All the major supermarkets have backed farmers in calling for the government to pause and reassess changes to inheritance tax which will hit family farms with land worth more than £1m.
However, Guy Singh-Watson, the founder of the Riverford organic vegetable box scheme, accused supermarkets of hypocrisy on inheritance tax, claiming the reason why farmers are struggling and asking for a concession on tax was because the retailers had “screwed farmers” on price.
“They are asking the taxpayer to subsidise their low prices,” he said.
Article by:Source: Sarah Butler
