6 2GT Thursday August 20 2020 | the times

the table

supplier management at Waitrose,

suggests that she would shop at M&S,

online or IRL, only to keep an eye on

a competitor. “We’re thrilled that they

are looking to Waitrose to replicate

what we do,” she says smoothly. While

M&S’s Ocado offer will initially feature

6,500 products, Waitrose will offer

14,000 to 17,000 in stores and online.

Including pants? “I can’t comment on

future specifics as it’s commercially

sensitive,” she says, “but there is plenty

of opportunity.”

Yet apart from the prospect of an

underwear price war (“Pants down!

Pants down!”), what will this mean

for the Ocado deliveries to which

Ann and I are hooked like junkies?

Surprisingly, in a taste test of 15

comparable products — or as close

as we could get to them in our

supermarket sweeps — M&S came

out top for both of us in 11.

Ann declared that the M&S

raspberries “tasted like the home-

grown ones of my childhood”. By

contrast, its coffee tasted of ashes and

defeat compared with Waitrose’s rich

brew. Yet nowhere did M&S succeed

more triumphantly than with its

eclairs, a sensory explosion on the

tongue. We could almost hear Dervla

Kirwan huskily saying in our ears as

we ate them: “This is not just a

suggestive foodstuff delivered to your

letterbox. This is an M&S suggestive

foodstuff delivered to your letterbox.”

spent £100 million beefing up its own

online business, implying that Ocado

was a useful set of training wheels in

the early days of t’internet, but now

it’s ready to zoom ahead alone. M&S

presents the new deal as a way of

getting more products, clothes as well

as food, to more customers and to fill

gaps in its offer, such as nappies and a

wider baby range launching next year.

However, M&S will broadly have

to replicate the existing Ocado

experience to retain online customers,

and Waitrose (whose own-brand

products made up 24 per cent of the

average Ocado basket) will have to

match the new service. M&S has

developed about 770 new products to

offer through Ocado, and some will

look familiar to Waitrose customers.

“Some of them are similar, there’s no

doubt about that,” says Claire

Hodgson, a product developer at M&S.

“But we use M&S principles in

developing any new line rather than

directly copying Waitrose.” This is not

just a generic ready meal, but an M&S

spin on a generic ready meal, as the

adverts might have it. Hodgson

brightly admits that “as a cook and

a foodie I’ve used Ocado for many

years”, and says “I’m pleased about

that, Nick” when I tell her I’m looking

forward to ordering my M&S pants

alongside my groceries.

Natalie Mitchell, the director of

technical and quality innovation and

New v old

A taste test

of the ranges

Stonebaked pizza with garlic

mushrooms and spinach

M&S, 443g, £4.

Crisp base, good tomato and fresh-

looking spinach, agreeable taste, but

sloppy distribution of ingredients. 3/

Waitrose, 395g, £4.

Doughy, chewy base, clumpy spinach

and mushroom. Good garlic hit. Yet a

bit like cheap, cheesy garlic bread. 2/

Marmalade

M&S, Fairtrade dark Seville orange,

340g, £1.

Big chunks of peel, pleasing acidity. 4/

Waitrose, Duchy organic thick cut,

340g, £

Alarming, artificial-looking colour,

weedy peel, indifferent sweetness. 2/

Wafer thin honey roast ham

M&S, 125g, £2.

Pleasant tang, authentic dry, crumbly

texture and long aftertaste. 4/

The home delivery

service that the

middle class relies

on is changing. Is

it such a bad thing,

asks Nick Curtis

L

ast week my wife, Ann,

and I indulged in

arguably our most

buttock-clenchingly

embarrassing display of

stereotypical bourgeois

behaviour in 25 years

together when we left

a friend’s birthday lunch early to get

home for an Ocado delivery. To heap

cliché on cliché, it was mostly wine.

Since we don’t have a car we have

become inordinately reliant on the

chattering classes’ favourite grocery

pusher over the years, especially for

heavy items — to the point where we

were offered favoured delivery slots

throughout lockdown. This

dependence has taken me slightly by

surprise because I used to be a bit of

a supermarket tart.

I used to favour my local Tesco for

good, cheap veg and fruit, and for

friendly service, till I heard the

company used the Covid crisis to once

again squeeze its suppliers (Ann’s

father had a dried fruit business and

told tales of bullying supermarkets

until his death). Tesco has denied this.

I quite liked my local Sainsbury’s

until it became an anodyne add-on to

a vast Inception-style property

development of wonky towers. At my

old flat and in a former office job I

used M&S simply because its branches

were closest.

Ann still favours M&S and will

shout down anyone who doubts the

superiority of its Belgian chocolate

eclairs — our go-to naughty treat

when we’re feeling indulgent — over

all pretenders. Yet when it comes to

topping up our Ocado deliveries, I’ve

become a Waitrose regular by default.

The brand sets off an alchemical

reaction in my brain, a warm and

fuzzy sense that as part of the staff-

owned John Lewis it is somehow more

ethical than other supermarkets

(although I’ve no idea if that’s true).

That it has the most flavourful

tomatoes to be found in London, the

Natoora range. That it always has an

excellent fish and meat selection and

its own-brand Scotch isn’t bad. Plus

there’s a full-size store and a Little

Waitrose within five minutes’ bike ride

of our house. Proximity breeds loyalty.

Yet now Ann is exultant. On

September 1, Waitrose’s status as

Ocado’s main supermarket partner

ends after almost two decades. M&S

will take over, having spent

£750 million on a half-share of Ocado’s

retail business in February 2019.

Then it looked like a gamble, and a

severely belated bid by Sparks to buy

into the online sphere, where it has

lagged far behind rivals. Now, with the

pandemic boosting online UK grocery

sales up to 13 per cent from 7.4 per

cent in March, and Ocado’s sales

increasing by 40 per cent in May, it

looks like a fortuitous move and a

palliative to the restructuring and job

losses announced by M&S this week.

Both chains are spinning the story

as favourably as possible. Waitrose has

Is the new Ocado any

The brand

sets off an

alchemical,

warm and

fuzzy

reaction in

my brain