The outspoken boss of frozen food giant Iceland has dismissed complaints by consumer group Which? about misleading supermarket pricing as “bollocks”.
Malcolm Walker’s remarks came after the competition regulator this week published a report criticising the UK’s leading supermarkets over some misleading promotional practices, but conceding the problems were not widespread.
The Competition and Markets Authority had launched its investigation after a “super-complaint” lodged by Which? in April claimed supermarkets’ misleading pricing tactics had duped shoppers out of hundreds of millions of pounds.
Speaking to trade publication Retail Week, Walker said the regulator’s conclusion proved supermarkets were not guilty of wrongdoing and he insisted customers were getting an “amazing deal”.
“[The super-complaint] is bollocks,” he said. “You look at the number of investigations into food retailers – and why? It’s political, we are a cheap target. They never find anything.”
He went on to shower praise on his higher-end competitors.
“Customers have always had an amazing deal because even though our margins have been high in the past, the standards in British supermarkets have been phenomenal.
“You go into a Sainsbury’s or Waitrose and they are just beautiful stores with high standards compared to countries abroad.”
It is not the first time the controversial Iceland boss has stuck his head above the parapet.
Earlier this year he launched an expletive-laden tirade at rivals Aldi, Lidl and Walmart-owned Asda that referenced the first and second world wars.
Speaking to the International Business Times in April he said: “We’ve beaten the Germans twice before and we’ll f*****g beat them again. There are the Germans and then there’s Asda, a bunch of f*****g Americans, we’re inundated with foreigners, Iceland is a British supermarket.”
In the same interview he also bemoaned what he called snobbery towards Iceland from “Guardian-reading Waitrose shoppers”. He said this was unfair as its new adverts showed the frozen food chain “had scallops and really good stuff on offer. We’re not just about cheap fish fingers”.
Unlike Walker, the bosses at Tesco and Sainsbury’s have remained tightlipped about the super-complaint and the subsequent CMA findings. Spokespeople at both supermarkets said the British Retail Consortium had responded on their behalf and that they would not be reacting further.
The retailers’ trade body said the allegations in the Which? report were “blown out of all proportion”.
“While the CMA report noted a limited number of specific examples of potentially confusing practices, it has concluded quite clearly that these problems are not systemic across the industry, as we have always maintained,” said Tom Ironside, director of business and regulation at the BRC.
The furore caused by the Which? complaint is unlikely to disappear in a hurry, however. The consumer group and the supermarkets now have 90 days to work together with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and Trading Standards to implement some of the recommendations made in the report.
These include drawing up clearer best practice guidelines for unit pricing and looking at clarifying the rules on how the law requires items to be unit-priced when on promotion.
