Consumed: How We Buy Class in Modern Britain

The article in The Times reporting on the chain’s final victory in NW3 could not hide its outright snobbery: ‘The most valid objection to [McDonald’s] is in fact their ubiquity and the fact that they have done so much in 18 years to debase the act of eating. Many customers are already excavating their purchases as they walk away from the counter, smearing ketchup around their mouths and grabbing handfuls of the deep-fried toothpicks that are parodies of the honest British “chip”.’

McDonald’s has undergone something of a transformation in the last six or seven years, particularly in Britain. There was certainly a time when I would never have taken my children into one of their outlets, partly because I disapproved of the food’s unhealthiness, partly because I am a reluctant owner of a wood-burning stove and quite like a flat white coffee – and with that comes a fairly large dollop of snobbism. Putting aside the issue of the food, most outlets just weren’t very nice, with harsh strip-lighting, sweaty formica tables and even less healthy-looking customers.

But the McDonald’s of the 1980s and 90s is no more. Partly spurred on by an alarming slippage in profits, partly thanks to a boss in Britain determined to tackle the hostility towards the brand, the restaurants started to go upmarket. The décor in all 1,200 branches was spruced up. Some now even have flowers on the table. The milk went organic, the eggs became free-range. Free WiFi was introduced, when this was an expensive luxury, and espresso and lattes started to be served. Then the recession came along, and it won over hundreds of thousands of new customers determined to continue enjoying a weekly meal out, or a morning cup of coffee on the way in to work, but keen to save money. Eight out of ten families in Britain with children visit at least once a year. My family is now one of those, though that horrifies some fellow north London parents.

There is still an astonishing level of animosity felt towards the golden arches, with much of it class based more than anything else. I interviewed the new British boss, Jill McDonald (no relation), who perhaps rather provocatively compared the burger chain to John Lewis, the epitome of understated Middleton taste on the high street. ‘You get the white van man in the morning stopping in for his egg McMuffin and you get the guy who has stopped off before his meeting with his laptop. There’s not that snobbishness about our brand any more,’ she said.

The reaction to the interview proved that there was still some way to go. ‘Only idiots and chavs go to McDonald’s … nobody but them would take their children there,’ said one online reader, responding to her comments. Another said: ‘I take one look at the customers inside with their noisy and totally uncontrolled offspring and back off quickly. Am I being snobbish? Probably, but I do not want to eat near that lot, nor do I want to walk about the street eating one of their products.’

Despite its move upmarket and its broad appeal to most of the country, McDonald’s will never really win over the Wood Burning Stovers, who like to think the food-on-the-go that they eat is individual, authentic and preferably ‘artisanal’. The fact that it is prepared in a big industrial kitchen on a trading estate in Park Royal, before being shipped out to their local gastro pub or sushi bar, is something they don’t consider. The key demographic for McDonald’s is Asda Mums – a large swathe of the population who straddle what some would call the lower middle class and the upper working class, but now defined in these recessionary times by their loyalty to the cheapest of Britain’s big four supermarkets. Food for Asda Mums is mostly fuel, not a statement of status. Their presiding concern is that their children are well fed, which means nutritiously so (they fret about the sugar content in Fruit Shoots), but that also means generously so. McDonald’s brilliantly supplies that need – and it is a fortnightly treat, and a guilt-free one at that, for many Asda Mums.

The company assiduously targets Asda Mums, through its advertising but also its associations, with its support of football, and tie-ups with Disney and other mass-popular movements. In a study by the think-tank Britain Thinks, undertaken during the summer of 2011, McDonald’s came third in a list of ‘the most working-class brands’ behind the Sun and Iceland and above KFC and Asda. It is revealing that four out of the five brands are food-related.

McDonald’s and KFC owe their place in this list partly to price, but partly to the ideals introduced by Wimpy back in 1954 – fast, quick service of a commoditised food. No one can ever feel as if they are going to be caught out either by their table manners, their pronunciation of a product or the arrival of a shockingly large bill at the end. Tipping and a wine list, two of the most anxiety-inducing social phenomena, are categorically absent from fast food.

The boss may be wrong about the snobs, but she is correct when she asserts that it is a ‘democratising’ brand, a term that Sir Terence Conran used in the 1960s to describe Habitat, his home furnishings shop. Thanks to fast food, eating out was no longer a social minefield.

If Asda Mums are the bedrock on which McDonald’s builds its success, then it is the Hyphen-Leighs who have turned Greggs into the country’s biggest fast food chain – with more outlets than anyone else. Based in Newcastle, Greggs has a range of nice bread, perfectly decent sandwiches and a selection of savoury pastries, selling an amazing 140 million sausage rolls every year – that is 800 every minute. But no food item in Britain, not even a Big Mac, has been the object of so much class debate in the last year. This came about when the Chancellor tried to close a long-standing (and complex) loophole that meant hot pasties, steak bakes and sausage rolls, as sold by Greggs, avoided VAT.

The political elite, many of them Wood Burning Stovers, mocked Gideon ‘George’ Osborne, son of a baronet and owner of a £3 million Notting Hill house, for failing to understand the diet of the hard-pressed working classes. Osborne’s critics had us believe that millions of Britons breakfasted, lunched and dined on pasties, rolls and onion bakes. Cheryl Cole, the Hyphen-Leighs’ pin-up of choice, was wheeled out to invoke the spirit of Oliver Twist, saying: ‘I would have been penniless as a teenager – and hungry – if I’d been taxed every time I had a hot pasty. Pasties, pizza, McDonald’s – we didn’t have a clue about nutrition. It was tasty and it was what we could afford.’

Just as bad was the sight of senior members of the shadow cabinet, including Ed Balls, trying to out-prole Osborne by sauntering into a Greggs (camera crew in tow) and casually ordering some pasties. Until Osborne made Greggs and its customers class martyrs – helped by the chain being championed by the Sun – it was widely derided, particularly by the likes of Asda Mums, for providing the lower orders with fatty, cheap pap. A ‘Greggs dummy’ was a phrase often used in the north east to refer to the sausage roll given to toddlers in their buggies to keep them quiet.

Of course selling £700 million worth of food every year means its customer base is extremely broad. Indeed, a cousin of mine who is an earl is so partial to a Greggs sausage roll that he invested some of the family fortune in the company’s shares. But then many of Britain’s aristocracy have always preferred nursery food over a ballotine de volaille and saffron infusions.

Even within something as seemingly innocuous as the lunchtime sandwich there are clear social distinctions, as evidenced in my own defiantly white-collar office. A fast-food burger or Greggs pasty is clearly unacceptable and only to be eaten ironically when suffering from a hangover. The Boots Shapers meal deal is for secretaries and junior staff in the advertising department only; the M&S sandwich, Pret à Manger wrap the safe option for the mass of mid-ranking reporters; while a box of Itsu sushi or Leon beetroot and horseradish soup is verging on ostentatious and suggests that office work is a tedious impediment to furthering one’s gourmet credentials. Columnists and those on the Arts Desk can get away with that. News editors show off by going to the local Italian delicatessen which whips up an overpriced, rather dry prosciutto and rocket ciabatta, but it comes wrapped in tasteful waxed paper. Of course, the really smart Wood Burning Stovers bring in their own sandwiches, ideally on home-made bread – or, better still, left-overs heated up in a wide-necked thermos flask. Perhaps Ottolenghi’s spiced winter couscous.

One colleague, with quiet pride, brought in home-cured bresaola. I was well and truly trumped and went back to munching on my re-heated mushroom risotto out of the Tupperware box.

These variations all occur within a very tight-knit group of (mostly) graduates, a fair few Oxbridge ones at that, working within a single office. Lunchtime choices are small, subtle public acts that allow you to set yourself apart within the restrictive office environment. Class has never been all about money. The cost of these lunches varies just a little, but the differing messages they send out are loud and clear. The home-made chorizo soup is less expensive than the Subway sandwich, but one is ‘middle class’ and one is not. If we are all middle class now, then we need to strive to distinguish ourselves from the ranks. Tucking into a sandwich from the country’s biggest eating-out operator just fails the test. Your lunch has to come from a more exclusive brand, or better still be completely unbranded.

Portland Privateers, in contrast, would rather slash the tyres on their BMW X5 than be spotted bringing a cellophane-wrapped home-made sandwich into their Mayfair office. They are remarkably unfussy about lunch, as long as it is a reputable brand. Most of them send out their secretary, or the work experience kid, for Itsu sushi or Birley sandwiches. Or they have miserable ‘water lunch meetings’ to prove how macho they are. This consists of bottled water and nothing else.

Finding unbranded food outlets in modern Britain can be a challenge. Expensive high street rents, cautious landlords, unimaginative town planners all conspire to encourage a familiar name over the door. But one of the reasons has been the relentless rise of the Middleton classes, those millions of families who within a generation have navigated their way through the choppy waters to end up at the front of the great class flotilla. If one of the abiding aspects of climbing up the social ladder is a fear of being found out, there is safety in clinging to an established name, a proven formula. The Berni Inns (founded in 1955), and all the chains that came after, allowed people to eat out, to enjoy a dash of glamour with scampi in a basket or lemongrass in the soup, but never be made a fool of. As people holidayed abroad and consumed hours of cookery programmes, restaurants became less daunting and visiting a chain outlet provided you with a failsafe option, whatever town you visited.

Berni’s place as a staging post on the climb upwards was taken by Browns, All Bar One, Pizza Express, Chez Gerard and Loch Fyne. In recent years we’ve reached the sunny uplands of Strada, Wagamama, Ping Pong, Yo! Sushi and Starbucks – all offering a bowl, or cup, of something exotic, all with unpronounceable names, all with strange, almost masonic rituals of how one orders and eats. But once we’ve cracked the formula, we have made it. The insouciance with which one mixes the wasabi into the dish of soy sauce, or orders a skinny Frappuccino, proves that you are a person who knows their mind and won’t be intimidated by any waiter or waitress – even if they have swapped their 1950s bow tie and pinafore for an attitude T-shirt and stud in their nose.

The majority are unable to afford or are too intimidated to eat at the Ivy or Claridges – venues reserved for the Portland Privateers, who like nothing more than a restaurant where a member of the paparazzi waits outside every evening: The Wolseley, Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck, anything associated with Gordon Ramsay (both a Portland Privateer and an Asda Mum pin-up), or Panacea in Manchester.

But high street, upmarket, branded dining chains are the economy-class ticket to a more sophisticated life, burnishing their customers with the vocabulary and grammar of cuisine. They are aspiration on a plate, and a public one at that. This explains why sellers of daily cups of frothy coffee – logically the first little luxury that should have been ditched when money is tight – in fact remained buoyant in the recession, even though this extravagance totals for many people well in excess of £1,000 a year. It is the most public symbol of having made it, a little paper clutch of success.

If eating out is all about public displays of aspiration, then surely within the privacy of one’s own fridge and store cupboard class should be totally absent. But this is not so. Soups: fresh chilled, canned or, heaven forfend, dried. Mustard: Colman’s, Maille, French’s, out of a squeezy yellow bottle, or Pommery moutarde de Meaux out of an earthenware jar. Breakfast cereals, breakfast bars, 99-calorie bars, dried mangoes, unsulphurised dried apricots, Medjool dates, bejewelled dates, star anise, sumac and saffron. Rice: American long-grain, basmati, Arborio – ‘Oh, but carnaroli is essential for risottos.’ Table salt, rock salt, sea salt, natural Halen Môn Anglesey sea salt with organic celery seed or just plain old Maldon; black pepper, white pepper, crushed pepper, never, never powdered pepper. The tyranny of choice. Waitrose has 47 different types of salt and pepper, Asda has 68 different varieties of mayonnaise or – drum roll – salad cream. Christmas 2011 saw Tesco sell 23 different types of Christmas pudding, from a 98p Tesco Value version to a £16 number topped with 24-carat gold leaf.

Coffee, however, tops them all, with the ownership of a cafetière once considered as much proof of membership of the middle classes as a reserved parking space at the golf club. But even with ‘proper’ coffee there are gradations of snobbery. The Portland Privateers have a Nespresso machine – electronic, showy, but neatly packaged, and it turns out a cup of coffee that looks classy. Mainstream Wood Burning Stovers and Rockabillies use a cafetière but the smugger WBS brigade use a Moka pot, one of those Italian metal stove-top devices that are a nightmare to wash up. Everyone else, at least in their own kitchen, uses instant. Curiously, Elizabeth David, the arbiter of so much culinary taste, herself hated real coffee and always preferred granules – a fact my wife trots out when the north London nespressorati arch their eyebrows on being asked for something out of a jar.

There are three main reasons for this staggering array of choice. First, and foremost, it is the result of the relentless mechanisation of food production combined with an unparalleled half-century of growth in disposable income. Farmers and food factories have been able to make food cheaper than ever before at the same time as customers have had the money to spend.

Second, it is the culmination of 60 years of experimentation – of freeing up the taste buds – that the end of food rationing and Elizabeth David and Raymond Postgate helped awaken and which took flight along with the first foreign holidays. David was the first of what would become a long line of cookery writers who not only provided recipes, but – in a strangely prescriptive fashion – laid down what was good food and what was not. A deb, who had been presented at court, she had the confidence to state categorically that the ideal was ‘sober, well-balanced, middle-class French cookery, carried out with care and skill’. Most working-class people from the provinces had just never been exposed to the Mediterranean produce she demanded – garlic, bay leaves, aubergines, courgettes and wine. Wine was something that was never drunk in the great majority of households. My father-in-law was typical of millions of working-class households in the 1950s in never drinking alcohol at home, save a toast on high days and holidays – and certainly never wine. He can remember the first time a bottle of ‘champagne’ came into the house – a present brought in by an uncle, who worked at the docks. A great hush descended as the family gathered around and opened the bottle. As a boy, he was aware of the disappointment from all the adults that there was no pop as the cork came out. They then quietly sipped their strangely dark and pungent liquid. It was, it turned out, Cognac Grande Champagne – a brandy, made from champagne grapes – but no one dared say anything that might suggest they had got it wrong. It seems inconceivable now, in a day when champagne is sold at £10 a bottle at Morrisons, that any family could have so little knowledge of what champagne looked or smelt like. Britain now consumes 35 million bottles of the fizzy stuff a year, enough for every household in the country to have one and a half bottles.

And thirdly, this bewildering choice in our kitchens has been driven by class divisions. Whereas once it was all about keeping up with the Joneses, now it is about differentiating ourselves from the Joneses. And helping us in this mission, indeed driving this project, is the world’s most sophisticated and powerful supermarket industry. Supermarkets not only have pioneered the cheap distribution of food, but they have also been at the cutting edge of social research, endlessly analysing who their customers are, and encouraging them to trade up – or sometimes down.

Now, about 80 per cent of all our food shopping is done in supermarkets. They didn’t even exist in 1954. Well, not in the way we would recognise them. Grocery shops were often fairly formal places, where you would be served by an apron-wearing assistant, who would stand behind a counter. The Co-op, at this stage the country’s largest food chain, had tried out ‘pay as you go out’ sections in its shops in the 1940s, but they had never taken off. It was left to Sainsbury’s to pioneer what was known back then as self-service with ‘Q-less shopping’. The company had converted a shop in Croydon in 1950 and cleverly used tough, unbreakable Perspex left over from wartime bombers as a means of protecting fresh food displays. By 1956 there were 3,000 self-service shops in Britain.

There are now well over 55,000 supermarkets, and with their growth has come the alarming decline of butchers, bakers and fishmongers. This rapid decline of the independents and rise of the supermarkets is often seen as a wholly bad thing. But the rise of large retailers, and their corresponding ability to negotiate hard with suppliers (because they were buying in such volumes), allowed us to eat more cheaply than we had ever done before. Back in 1957 a family had to spend on average more than a third of its disposable income on food and non-alcoholic drink. Despite recent food inflation spikes, this figure has fallen dramatically since the 1950s and now stands at only at 17 per cent. Food is still cheap in relative terms.

Most of us can now easily afford to buy all the calories we need, with spare change left over to spend on the fripperies, herbs, spices and exotica that mark us out as sophisticates. Nowadays, that may mean aioli from Tesco’s deli counter or samphire from Morrisons’ vegetable section. We have come a long, long way. It was not until 1970 that Sainsbury’s first sold pasta. It really was that exotic just a generation ago, and didn’t make it into the Office for National Statistics annual basket of goods (used to measure inflation) until 1987. Prior to the 1970s it was the preserve of specialist delicatessens, of which there were plenty in London, Edinburgh and wealthy market towns, but none at all in many working-class areas. That was why, on 1 April 1957, so many people were fooled by the spoof Panorama documentary that purported to show spaghetti growing on trees. Sainsbury’s now sells more than 70 different types of pasta, from wholewheat organic conchiglie to fresh walnut and gorgonzola tortellini. In 2011 the final triumph of continental over British eating habits, of Elizabeth David over luncheon meat, occurred when trade figures showed that, as a nation, we bought more olives than peanuts. The trendy wine bar had overtaken the pub.

The rise of the supermarkets and the rise of the middle classes went hand in hand with the rise of working women. Not only did this post-war phenomenon create a double-income household with the means to enjoy the finer things in life, it involved the woman of the household spending less time in the kitchen – for many a liberating experience their mothers could only have dreamed of. But this was only possible with the supermarket, selling frozen and processed food.

In the early days it was the brands that led the way. They were the ones to hold the hand of the nervous consumer having a go at cooking a cake from a pre-prepared mix, or serving up a TV dinner. And the well-trusted names of Flora, Birds Eye, Heinz, Fry’s, Batchelors, Cookeen, Vesta and Crosse & Blackwell introduced housewives and their families to not just a host of new flavours, but also endless short-cuts. Brands, invariably slightly more expensive than cooking from scratch, were mostly looked up to as an affordable luxury at this stage.

Frozen food could only become part of people’s lives once they had a freezer, which started to happen in the 1950s. By the end of the decade about 20 per cent of households had a freezer, and sales of frozen food doubled between 1955 and 1957.

Birds Eye even opened their own chain of shops, and when frozen peas first became available there were queues out of the door in Kendal, such was the interest and hype surrounding these amazing things. Birds Eye frozen peas were also the first brand ever to be advertised in colour on British television.

But though owning a freezer was considered a major achievement for many families, frozen food after a while took on the air of inauthenticity, of food without distinction. And fish fingers, introduced in 1955, became the primary villain. The story goes that they were going to be called ‘frozen cod pieces’, until just a few weeks before the launch and someone pointed out how foolish Birds Eye would look. Children loved them. Thick Japanese-style breadcrumbs (the secret to the M&S Kiev) and an unthreatening-shaped piece of cod were promoted aggressively by television advertising – a primary black mark for many foods in a Wood Burning Stover household. Linda Shanovitch, revising for her 11-plus exam as a north London schoolgirl in the 1960s, recalled: ‘My parents were frightfully middle class so it would have been a disaster not to pass the 11 plus. I was terrified of failing. I remember on the day of the exam I got home and for a special treat my mother let me have fish fingers, which I was usually never allowed as she saw them as working-class food. All of my friends were working class, so I always wanted fish fingers. As it turned out I passed the exam and did really well.’

When Elizabeth David revised her epic of French provincial cooking in 1977, she listed the deep freeze and prefabricated sauces as two of the evils of modern cooking.

After a washing machine and a television, a separate freezer was the most likely of all durable goods to be owned by a household headed up by an unskilled manual worker by the mid-1990s.

Easy access to frozen pizzas, ready meals and ice cream was considered at the time a higher priority than even a telephone or video recorder.

Today’s fish fingers are Cheese Strings, Cocoa Pop Mega Munchers, Fruit Shoots – all highly processed, heavily advertised foods aimed at children and jeered at by the those who email the You and Yours programme on Radio 4. Sunny Delight was briefly catapulted into the position of Britain’s third most popular drink (behind Coke and Pepsi) after a relentless TV campaign. But after reports suggesting it turned toddlers orange it became so vilified that it has all but disappeared from view.

All of these products may be detested by Wood Burning Stovers, but they are a godsend for Asda Mums, who have an instinctive trust in big brands and a willingness to succumb to the pester power of advertising, while also managing to fret about the nutritional content of their children’s food. Asda Mums are one of those rare demographic groups that were invented by marketing executives but took on a life of their own. Originally brought together by the supermarket’s own PR team in the run-up to the 2010 election, they were latched onto by the politicians – becoming the heirs to Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman, these mythical hard-working, aspirational, floating voters that had swung it for both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Both Cameron and Gordon Brown were persuaded to record special video messages for Asda Mums, along with famously taking part in biscuit-based webchats on Mumsnet.

Asda Mums now live on in the form of focus groups that the supermarket convenes to help it understand its customers better. I met some of them in Bootle, Liverpool, one of the poorest areas of the country, where the shiny new Asda stands across the road from the bleak Strand shopping centre, forever etched into the national consciousness as the setting of a grainy ten-second CCTV film – showing the last recorded moments of James Bulger’s life.

Asda attracts 18 million shoppers through its doors every week, so it is ludicrous to suggest its customers are one particular type. But Asda Mums are a particular sub-section and are more definable. They are mostly council house tenants, relentless about finding bargains and cutting down on food bills for themselves, but keen to give their children lunch-box treats of packaged goodies such as Dairylea Dunkers or Rice Krispie Squares. The name of a big, highly advertised manufacturer on the package makes them confident rather than sceptical about the wisdom of their purchase. And their anxiety about providing good food translates into buying a surprisingly large amount of organic food for their toddlers even though they know it costs more and is probably no better than standard. Again, it is the label rather than the content that gives reassurance. Strawberries are another popular snack among Asda Mums – further proof that this particular fruit has become so mass-market that it has lost all snob value. Raspberries are much smarter, but Rockabillies know that the only truly posh summer fruit to impress your guests with at a dinner party are gooseberries – preferably picked from your own garden.

Asda Mums, of course, can be found not just in Asda, but also in Tesco, Morrisons, Iceland and even Sainsbury’s. The key defining factor is not the name above the supermarket door as much as the attitude towards what they put in their basket. Despite their need and desire to keep their shopping bills down, they are curiously attracted to premium brands, with many of them unwilling to buy Smart Price goods. This is Asda’s range of own-label value food. One said: ‘I don’t know why I wouldn’t, I just presume it wouldn’t taste as good. There’s got to be a reason why it’s so cheap, and it’s not just the advertising. The quality would not be as good.’ Another said: ‘Two days before pay day, I would have nothing in the house, I would buy Smart Price. But I wouldn’t get Smart Price meat. I just wouldn’t buy Smart Price ham. Think of the tubes.’

Smart Price is at the bottom of Asda’s little ladder of brands, with Asda Chosen by You in the middle and Asda Extra Special at the top. Asda Mums know their place – firmly in the middle, and only reluctantly slipping down to the bottom when circumstances force them to.

This is in sharp contrast to Rockabillies, who don’t give two hoots about food brand, as long as it tastes nice and isn’t too expensive (in their eyes). They are happy to pop into Tesco or Asda without any hint of condescension; Sainsbury’s is their default supermarket but they would prefer Waitrose if one was available. This explains the success of the Waitrose Essential range of food. Waitrose is clearly at the top of the supermarket tree – it has been the champion of the Prince of Wales’s Duchy Originals produce, and seller of Charlie Bigham’s steak and ale pies which come in their own porcelain ramekins. The charity shops of Swaffham and Uckfield are awash with these little cast-off dishes. Stacked on a kitchen table, they are as obvious a trophy for a Waitrose shopper as a stolen Quaglino ashtray was for a Portland Privateer back in the early 1990s. Which other supermarket stocked £412 bottles of Château Mouton Rothschild? But during the recession of 2009 it started to lose customers, not just to Tesco but also to Aldi and Lidl. In response it brought out a value range called Waitrose Essential, which many thought would be a disaster – if you need to save money, stop shopping at Waitrose. Except it wasn’t really value at all. In fact, 1,200 of the 1,400 in the range were exactly the same – and the same price – as previous Waitrose own-brand products, but just repackaged in basic, white labels, I was told by the supermarket. It was all about kidding the customers that Waitrose wasn’t as expensive as they thought it was. When I asked, at the time, wouldn’t the well-heeled customers feel a little embarrassed about being seen popping a value range into their basket, the commercial director told me: ‘Far from it. We have found some customers putting their Waitrose goods in Tesco bags, because they are nervous that their neighbours will think they are decadent for shopping at Waitrose.’

Rockabillies hate showiness when it comes to food, but quite like the good things in life, so they had found a brand just for them. Waitrose Essentials just a few years down the line sells more than £1 billion every year. That’s the power of reverse snobbism.

These clever sub-brands within supermarkets were the brainchild of Tesco – as so many supermarket innovations are – and were a response to another recession. It was its way of competing with the European supermarket companies known as ‘hard discounters’ coming to Britain in the early 1990s. They included Aldi and Netto, who, along with Kwik Save, started a major supermarket price war. This was the era of the 7p loaf of bread and the absurd situation of the 3p tin of baked beans – priced at less than the cost of the aluminium and beans themselves, let alone the cost of transporting the cans to store.

Tesco decided to make the price war permanent by launching Tesco Value. This would not just be a short-term promotion selling bargain beans, it would be a whole range of groceries packaged in utilitarian white, red and blue labels that shouted: cheap. Loo roll, washing-up liquid, digestive biscuits, bacon, bread … it offered an entire weekly shop on a cut-price budget. But what made Tesco such a pioneer was that it started to analyse customer data in astonishing levels of detail thanks to its Tesco Club Card, which had been launched in 1995. It had on file the postcode, date of birth and detailed spending patterns of millions of its customers. What day of the week you bought Tesco Value cheddar, when you splashed out on Brie, where you filled up with petrol, when you bought a pregnancy kit and even whether it had been positive (all those vitamin pills, and a drop in sales of white wine). The company was sitting on a database more valuable than the Office for National Statistics.

This data was initially used to help it be more accurate when it mailed out certain offers – there was no point posting a 10p-off voucher for nappies to a pensioner or sending a two-for-one beer offer to a teetotaller. The ultimate use of the data was in developing a strategy, which has now been adopted by almost all major retailers aiming at the mass market. They called it ‘good, better, best’. The Tesco Value line was good; their normal Tesco-branded products were ‘better’; and in 1995 it launched Tesco Finest, its ‘best’. At the time Tesco’s marketing director said the company’s ambition was to be ‘classless … to be the natural choice of the middle market’. But by segmenting and introducing Finest the company was able to attract a whole swathe of Middleton classes, those who might feel uncomfortable upgrading to Waitrose (or who don’t have one nearby) but are keen to assert their superior status, while still keeping Asda (or Tesco) Mums happy. This segmentation can be seen at Sainsbury’s, with its Basics, By Sainsbury’s and Taste the Difference, and at Asda, with its Smart Price, Asda Chosen by You and Extra Special. But it is also a tactic used by other shops including Marks & Spencer, B&Q and Homebase. It is now standard procedure among these big chains to analyse the customer base intensely and offer them within one shop an entirely different selection of products based on their socio-economic category. This gives customers the tantalising option of ‘trading up’ as well as the face-saving option of ‘trading down’ if they are short of cash but unwilling to suffer the shame of going to a more downmarket supermarket.

You might be one of 33 million shoppers who shop each week at Tesco, but by buying Finest you are in a separate class. Upgrade to Organic and you’re home and dry.

The real battleground was our old friend the ready meal. It was here that it was easiest to segment, to ‘add value’, as the jargon went, and indeed to strip out costs. M&S pioneered the concept, but as the microwave took off during the 1980s and 90s other supermarkets were able to develop a whole range of packaged and processed meals designed for customers who were working longer hours, and had the desire for more sophisticated food, but lacked the skill or inclination to cook it themselves.