We don't need bigger supermarkets, we need better quality produce

The day a two-football-pitch-sized supermarket broke my brain

Photo by Edward on Pexels

It was a quick trip home to the UK that did it.

My brother picks me up from the airport and asks if we can stop at the out-of-town supermarket on the way home. We need groceries for dinner.

It’s been a while since I’ve visited one of these stores. But there we were, standing in 100,000 square feet of food and consumer goods. On my walk around the aisles, I count nearly 30 different types of hummus.

I wonder. Do we need 30 different types of hummus?

I lose my brother as he searches for Bluey-branded yoghurts for his kids. Wonder if I’ll ever find him again. Because they’re big, these supermarkets. One-stop shops for everything you could ever want, even if you don’t know it yet.

Standing in the chip aisle, the overwhelm of decision paralysis kicks in. And I feel…done. Done with this way of grocery shopping. The way I have shopped for most of my life.

Do we really need endless jam varieties? Or four aisles dedicated to chips and cookies alone? Or do we, in fact, need the one thing these supermarkets are not giving us right now —

Better quality produce.

If convenience is king, then choice is queen

They rule together, giving their subjects what they want.

But convenience and choice take up space. On average 48,000 square feet of it. A sixfold increase from 80 years ago.

So we have our choice and our convenience. But at the same time, we have stories about shady practices. And about the horrors of what some humans endure to give us exactly what we want in our supermarkets, thousands of miles away.

In late 2024, the BBC broke a story about tomato purée. The story goes that some British supermarkets were labeling their tomato purées as Italian when the tomatoes came from China.

So far, so breach in trading standards. But the story got worse.

The Xinjiang region of China has perfect tomato growing conditions and is also home to “re-education camps.” Human rights groups suggest that one million people are detained in the region. And the BBC alleged that some are forced to pick these tomatoes — up to 650kg a day.

People reported being tortured if they didn’t hit quota. Strung from ceilings and beaten.

All (allegedly) so British supermarkets can have their “Italian” tomato purée at 65p a tube.

No, this isn’t necessarily a food quality issue. But it is a quality of human life issue. And that is just as — no, more — important.

Speaking of which, across the pond, the US’s new administration is calling to increase the speed of slaughterhouse lines. 140 chickens a minute could rise to 175. Meat packing is already one of the most dangerous jobs in the US, and this change could make it even more so.

Then there are the chickens themselves. 99% of the US meat is raised on factory farms. Ninety-nine is a popular number — according to one report, it’s also the percentage of diseased chickens sold in US supermarkets.

Back in the UK, supermarkets came for the sourdough. They rode high on a trend with little regard for what sourdough actually is — a bread made with naturally occurring yeast. Some supermarkets didn’t care about that. They put baker’s yeast in there but called it sourdough. Made it expensive too:

People equate the word “sourdough” with a higher level of quality. If supermarkets are raising the price of bread on the promise that it’s sourdough, don’t consumers have the right to know if that isn’t really the case?

I’ve not even touched on the mould found in jam. Or fecal contamination in bagged salad. Or the drop in nutrient value of popular fruits and vegetables.

Maybe I don’t need to. Maybe you already know.

It’s well known supermarkets don’t prioritise quality food

Ninety four percent of us have noticed a decline in quality in recent years, most notably in fruit, vegetables and own-brand goods. We’ve read Chris van Tulken’s Ultra Processed People or Benjamin Lorr’s The Secret Life of Groceries.

We know. But we’re also stuck in a system where just 10 companies own nearly every grocery brand in the world.

And supermarket dominance is not letting up. 90% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart. 65% of the US’s calorific intake comes from supermarkets, whilst only three percent is from specialty stores or farmers markets (the rest is made up from eating out and convenience stores).

Even here in Portugal — a place where ethical food choices drive buying decisions far more than the EU average — things are changing. They’ve just renovated the supermarket downstairs from my apartment. First thing I noticed is how much bigger they made the convenience food section — and how they reduced the fruit and vegetable aisle to make room for it.

This is not surprising — this is a supermarket who has said they want to be on every corner of every neighbourhood.

Everything bigger, all the time.

But not everyone wants to forgo quality. One of the biggest 2025 grocery trends is sustainability. 95% of shoppers are trying to shop more sustainably in the grocery store. They’re prepared to pay for it too — up to 10% more.

It will come as little surprise that Gen Zs are leading the trend. Seeing as they are expected to become the biggest economic force in the next 10 years, supermarkets would be remiss to ignore them and what they want.

To survive, supermarkets will, eventually, have to make a change.

And I’ve seen how it could be. I’ve spent months in Albania, where — despite it being one of the poorest countries in Europe — supermarkets make a point of stocking locally sourced food.

I’ve worked in France, where organic produce accounts for nearly 10% of the country’s food revenues. No, organic farming is not perfect, but it is indicative of food systems willing to consider health and quality, not just profits.

I’ve also — like many of us — lived in systems where consumers want better quality produce but don’t have the money to spend on it. If you can’t pay your gas bill, are you going to opt for eggs from happy chickens at a dollar a go?

Possibly not.

These are macro concepts that go to the very heart of how we eat. How we shop. Our economic and psychological relationship with the very thing that sustains life itself. There are no clean answers. As Benjamin Lorr, author of The Secret Life of Groceries said in a podcast:

There aren’t any tidy solutions and there is nothing that provides neat answers. My editor was banging the drum, like “let’s get a final chapter with six bullet points that tell us how to solve it” and I was like, absolutely not.

There may be no tidy solutions, but there are untidy ones. Not a unified method across continents, more of an individual, bite-sized approach (pun intended).

Like buying those happy eggs sometimes. Like — as many of my clients would do in my wine store — buy better quality wine but less often.

Like reducing food waste (I can help with that). Or increasing three per cent expenditure at indie stores and farmer’s markets to four or five per cent. Like shopping seasonally and locally when we can.

Macro ideas on the micro level. It’s all we can do.