Comment by mattmanser
2 years ago
You misunderstood me slightly. It is not the only supplier. It is just the vastly dominant brand on the shelves.
We have a few supermarket brands that have taken over every town and village local store.
As space is constrained in those stores (long story to do with Sunday trading laws), they stock one, two or three brand of lots of different items. Like there's one choice of poppadoms. Or one brand of english mustard. And one brand of Dijon mustard. Etc.
So the stores have a wide selection of goods, but a shallow selection of each individual good.
In the case of baked beans, you will always have Heinz. You might have one other choice, depending on the supermarket brand. Often the other choice is cheap, and nowhere near as tasty.
Bigger stores have more choice.
One noticeable change is that co-op didn't used to bother stocking their own brand ketchup in smaller stores. It sold so poorly Vs Heinz it wasn't worth the shelf space. That has changed, and I'm sure other super markets are making similar changes. For context Heinz has decided on a ridiculous £4.50 a bottle, while the Co-op own brand is £1.90. Heinz used to be about £2.50-£2.90ish I think before the greedflation.
>In the case of baked beans, you will always have Heinz. You might have one other choice, depending on the supermarket brand. Often the other choice is cheap, and nowhere near as tasty.
>Bigger stores have more choice.
So why isn't there a brand that's cheap and tasty? Does Heinz have some sort of proprietary bean tech that others can't replicate? Is there a fundamental trade-off between tastiness and price?
In many cases—yes, there is a straightforward tradeoff between taste—or quality, more generally—and price.
In particular, with most of the cheapest mainstream brands, they've spent years finding the cheapest they can produce the product for that customers will still accept.
Basically, if the beans could be made tastier, while still being that cheap, Heinz would have done that already, leaving no room for a competitor to do so.