Upscale online grocer Waitrose 'worst in freshness'

UK’s upscale grocer Waitrose is Britain’s worst online retailer when it comes to freshness in delivered grocery items, media reports said on Monday (23) citing recent research by a consumer watchdog, which hailed Tesco as the top performer.

Waitrose, which launched its own online business last year after ending a partnership with Ocado, was ranked lowest in investigative research undertaken by consumer specialists at Which?. The specialists investigated the quality and longevity of fresh produce from UK grocers using a team of 12 undercover shoppers who ordered the same 16 perishable grocery items from the UK’s top six online supermarkets to examine how fresh their food and drink products are.

While items from Tesco, UK’s largest supermarket that also topped the charts freshness in the research, lasted for an average of 11 days, the items from Waitrose lasted for just 8.6 days.

Apart from coming at the top for freshness, Tesco also showed the expected shelf life of perishable items on its website while in the received orders, none of the goods had damaged packaging or food that had gone off by the time it was delivered, unlike some rivals, including Waitrose.

Tesco was closely followed by Asda, which had an average of 10.5 days of shelf life on its products on all grocery items, although it did deliver one pack of bacon on its use-by date. The online-only supermarket Ocado was closely behind Asda with an average life of 10.4 days for products.

Undercover shoppers also reported having received expired pots of single cream from Sainsbury’s and Ocado. Three items from Asda, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s were delivered on their use-by dates- implying shoppers had just hours left to the consumer the products- while eight items were delivered with a use-by date of the following day – four from Sainsbury’s, three from Waitrose and one from Morrisons.

Shoppers also reported that a couple of products from Waitrose, despite being within use-by date, seemingly had gone bad- including minced beef where the packaging had expanded with air.

Asda and Ocado also delivered a couple of products that were within use-by dates but had gone bad.

Apart from freshness, packaging also appeared to be an issue as the shoppers reported that 10 grocery items were so damaged the food may not have been safe to eat- including leaking cream and milk from Ocado, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose.

Waitrose said: “We always train our partners to pick products with the longest best-before date for online deliveries. We’re sorry this fell short of our high standards and are committed to making this better for our customers.

“From time to time we sometimes shorten the date codes on certain fresh produce to ensure it’s at optimum quality, so this may also have been a factor behind the results.”

Although most of the supermarkets said they train staff to pick food with the longest possible dates for online deliveries and 'click and collect', a number of supermarket workers told Which? that speed targets put them under pressure when trying to pick the freshest groceries, reports said.