What Tesco can learn from its Carrefour entente cordiale
As the British chain joins forces with France’s Carrefour stores, Debora Robertson offers some tips for an entente cordiale
This weekend, Tesco announced it was forming a strategic alliance with French supermarket behemoth Carrefour to buy products for more than 19,000 stores. They say it will create more choice and lower prices and, no doubt, will be a clever riposte to the Sainsbury’s and Asda mega merger, which was announced in April and could see them cornering a 31.4per cent share of the UK grocery market.
What none of the business pages is talking about, however, is that this news has hit our homegrown farmers’ market botherers right where it hurts: in the conscience. Normally, this tribe and their repurposed corduroy shopping bags wouldn’t be seen dead in a supermarket, as they will tell you right after they’ve bored you endlessly with tales of foraging for artisanal potato waffles. But, you know, what plays on holiday, stays on holiday, and very few can resist the lure of a holiday supermarket sweep.
Who among us doesn’t love a run round a foreign supermarket? On my own trips to France, almost the first thing I do, before a church has been visited, a standing stone admired, or an artist’s atelier explored, is a quick trip to the local hypermarché. What is seen as a chore at home becomes a sort of grocery-based social anthropological field trip, as I examine every tin and jar for clues.
In these days of increasing globalisation, it’s tempting to think everything is the same everywhere, and, of course, you find many of the same big brands in French supermarkets as here, but there are still treasures to discover.
One of the pleasures of living in the South East is how easy it is to pop over the Channel to Calais’ Cité Europe, and its branch of Carrefour, to fulfil my French shopping fix. I’m also addicted to insomnia-inspired visits to frenchclick.co.uk, to assuage my Gallic cravings – particularly in the form of French laundry detergent made from savon de Marseille, so that my sheets always smell like holidays (yes, I know, I am that person). So, it is fair to say I am excited about this novel nouvelle alliance, and want to see it go well. And it will, if Tesco sits up and takes notes out of the Carrefour playbook.
What Tesco can learn from Carrefour
Rename those boring old shopping trolleys les chariots. This is guaranteed to have customers rolling in the aisles – less weary shopper grabbing a few ready meals, more Boadicea gathering a feast fit for the Iceni.
Be generous with the tastings, particularly booze. My local French hypermarché is never without some smooth-faced wine maker in an immaculately pressed shirt standing to attention by an upturned barrel, keen to press a glass of perfectly chilled rosé into your hands before you head off to grapple with kitchen paper and tinned goods. Anything that adds an air of the cocktail party to the weekly shop is to be encouraged. Santé!
Stock French crisps, those “homecooked in olive oil” ones in clear plastic bags – more apéro hour, less back of the bus on a school trip.
Check out what the in-house pharmacy looks like. There is not a coroner in the land who manages to muster a fraction of the gravitas of your average French pharmacist. Part shopkeeper, part shrink, part dispenser of medicines, they are perfection if you can just get them to rein in their obsession with suppositories.
Ditch those punnets of hard nectarines and go for proper ripe and local produce that both smells and tastes wonderful. But please don’t adopt the French habit of having customers weigh all of their own fruit and veg, like some sort of farmer. That’s just not British.
Add an element of the hunter to stores. We’ve become so detached from any notion of where our food comes from that a supermarket which leaves rabbits with their eyes in (also, please stock rabbit) and chickens with their heads on, is bound to ruffle a few feathers. Good.
More tins such as those from Reflets de France, which make canned goods positively glamorous. More confit de canard, cassoulet and petit salé aux lentilles, less beans and sausages (though a lot of it is beans and sausages, when you think about it).
Think class in a glass. Rust-coloured fish soups, which by dint of being in glass jars become less invalid remedy,
more dinner party worthy, and rough pâtés that look almost as though you’ve made them yourself if you steam off the label. I have already said too much.
Stock posh soft drinks to encourage the entente cordiale. Now that Orangina is as ubiquitous as Fanta, what we really want are those smart sirops with their pretty labels and myriad flavours – such as violet, pink grapefruit and rose – they might be just what it takes to get us through this hot summer with our livers intact.
Consider supplying staff with roller skates, as they do in some of the larger French supermarkets. For added jollity, in some of the more recherché branches (note to Tesco: create some of these), consider a disco soundtrack – Donna Summer on aisle four – and possibly a few glitter balls.
This has hit farmers’ market botherers right where it hurts: in the conscience