Why Do Supermarkets Offer So Many Food Choices When Food Quality is Plummeting?

If you had to pick food variety or food quality, which one would you choose?

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Seventeen.

That’s how many types of bagged salad I counted on a British supermarket shelf the other day.

Not to mention the 10 different loose lettuce varieties and seven types of apples.

What a shame then, when I bought a few of them to sample, it all tasted like…nothing.

Mushy lettuce. A woolly mess of an apple.

In places like the US or the UK, we have so many food choices. Our supermarkets are the size of warehouses with rows upon rows of food. I totted up nearly 18,000 grocery products on Tesco.com. Walmart lists 75 million products and 55% of their revenue comes from groceries.

When it comes to food, we have more choices of what to eat than ever before. The problem is, quality — and our trust in that food — have plummeted.

Which begs the question: what is the point in all this variety when it tastes so bad?

Variety up, quality down

When 94% of people claim they have noticed a dip in the quality of supermarket produce, that’s a big problem for the hands that feed us.

The biggest decline was reported in arguably the most important aisle — the fresh fruit and vegetable section.

The decline of quality food is nothing new. Supermarket fruit and vegetables have seen nutrition levels decrease for some time thanks to cosmetic perfection, soil depletion and the championing of breeds that yield bigger — but less nutritiously — dense crops.

There are other reasons like poor harvests. Or that thanks to inflation, prices have risen and thus so have people’s expectations.

There’s skimpflation, a practice where supermarkets slowly decrease ingredient quality (for example reducing the pork content in sausages).

Then there is the focus of this story — the sheer volume of food variety.

Take those bagged salads. No one needs 17 different iterations of iceberg, watercress and baby leaf (arguably no one needs bagged salad at all). No one needs seven different brands of hummus, all of which taste exactly the same.

And certainly no one needs — count them — 22 different types of sliced cheese and nine grated:

Image courtesy of author, snapped in a British supermarket

Yet here we are.

We are here because of a complex mix of consumer demands (we have become accustomed to choice) supplier competition, and the internet (more advertising and access to products).

If all this choice meant better quality, one could argue that variety is indeed the spice of life.

But it’s not.

Trust in British supermarkets is the lowest it's been since the 2013 horsemeat scandal. In the US, four corporations account for 80% of supermarket-sold meat. These companies have been accused of poor environmental, animal welfare and health practices.

We may have all the choices in the world on our supermarket shelves but who is that good for? You? Or the corporations profit from you?

It doesn’t have to be this way and other countries prove it.

Who says the more the choice, the better the world?

Below my apartment in Portugal is both a grocers and a chain supermarket. Whenever someone comes to visit they comment on the lack of choice in both.

Only half an aisle dedicated to both chips, nuts and cookies must seem weird when your home supermarket has a whole aisle of Doritos, Lay’s and their own-brand knock-offs.

Their criticism is indicative of a wider issue — that we assume the more choice, the better. There’s a reason people call America the Republic of Choice.

In Portugal, we don’t have that choice.

But we do have quality. Even in the supermarkets — and especially in the grocers.

Yes, I miss picking up certain ingredients. I would be able to source Turkish pomegranate molasses, Spanish smoked paprika, or Madagascan vanilla if my life depended on it.

But the salad actually tastes of something. Staples like butter or olive oil are from Portugal, not thousands of miles away. The fruit changes with the seasons. One week it’s cherries, the next it’s passion fruit.

This reflects the Portuguese attitude to food. 65% of Portugal strongly identify with the need for ethical food which is much higher than the EU average of 52%. And 81% of them make their buying decisions based on quality and freshness.

No wonder my local grocers always has a queue out of the door.

Coming from the UK which, like America, prides itself on consumer choice, I had to adjust to the Portuguese way. I had to learn how to substitute ingredients in my cooking. I had to make my peace with not having access to all ingredients all the time.

The blow was softened however by the quality of the food. When you can make a salad of greens, lemon juice and olive oil that blows your mind, you don’t mind about the lack of what I previously considered pantry staples.

Your brain is too happy to care.

The illusion of choice is just that

Choice isn’t always a good thing yet humans crave it. Psychologists say that this is because:

choice = control = survival

I saw the realities of this play out in my wine store and bar every day. People said they wanted the choice of thousands of bottles or an extensive by-the-glass list. They wanted the control of choosing exactly what they wanted.

But when we gave people choices — like when I trialled a long drinks menu — I’d watch decision paralysis kick in. People spent forever choosing. Then they’d worry they’d chosen wrong.

Or they didn’t choose at all and asked me to do it for them.

We already make around 227 choices around food every single day. Do we want to add to that by shopping somewhere that stocks 75 million items?

More isn’t always better. Not for you, and certainly not when it comes to championing quality produce.

It doesn’t even work for the supermarket. Some supermarkets have reduced choice in stores over recent years. Aldi and Lidl make a big thing about being “single option stores” — places that focus on own-brand products rather than stocking every brand General Mills ever made.

Whilst I’m all for supermarkets reducing choice, what I want to see is an uptick in quality. But unless I’m bumping into you in my local Portuguese supermarket, the chances are you’re stuck with those 17 different types of tasteless bagged salad.

Less choice doesn’t automatically mean better quality. For that, we’ve got to make intentional choices.

There is no easy answer to this. Supermarkets have their claws so deep into the way we buy food, sometimes it feels like we have to toe their line or starve.

I can tell you the usual. Buy seasonally. Buy local. Buy the best you can afford.

These solutions don’t work for everyone. You have to live in certain places or be from a certain socioeconomic background to arm yourself against poor-quality food.

And that, friends, is probably the saddest sentence I’ve written all week.

We can only do what we can do with the resources we have at our disposal.

But what we shouldn’t do is throw our hands up and declare it’s all over. That big corporations have won. That we should make our peace with big-variety-poor-quality food outlets.

Ultimately, the biggest thing we can personally do is shift our thinking away from the more choices the better. We should prioritise seasonality and quality. Out-of-season tomatoes taste awful anyway, so why buy them?

And why buy into the idea that choice is always good?

I’ll leave you with this thought. I spent three years as a full-time traveler, at the mercy of local markets and Airbnb kitchens. I’d had 35 years of basking in the choice of British supermarkets but with travel, I was thrown into a world with very little choice.

That was especially true in poorer countries like my few months in Albania.

I expected it to be awful but it was glorious. I spent less time choosing what to make for dinner. My cooking improved. I was more creative. So much so, I became a recipe developer with a focus on seasonal, flexible, few-ingredient recipes.

As for Albania, it may have been one of the poorest countries I visited — and little food choice out of what was grown locally — but it has the best quality produce I have ever seen. And it was available to everyone.

Which just goes to show. Choice and quality don’t go hand in hand.

If we want the latter, we might have to forgo the former.

When it comes to your health, wealth and happiness, that’s no bad thing.