A history of the premium ranges

The country’s biggest selling supermarket premium food range is also its first. Tesco launched Finest in 1998, cementing the three price tiers which now underpin the supermarket offering: “good, better, best” is how the retailers describe it, but it’s “cheapo, normal, posh” to the rest of us.

The idea was planted five years earlier when supermarkets started selling budget ranges in an attempt to stem the success of discounters; Aldi had opened its first UK store in 1990. But Tesco wanted both ends of the market aiming to tempt in highspending Marks & Spencer customers as well as Aldi and Lidl shoppers. Finest was born. The other supermarkets took notice, and Asda Extra Special and Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference both launched in 2000. Taste the Difference leads the way in terms of variety, with more than 1500 products now in the range, and around 1000 currently available on the website, nearly three times as many as Tesco Finest, and 50 per cent more than Asda Extra Special.

Not to be left behind, Aldi introduced its Specially Selected range in 2005 and Lidl followed suit in 2008 with its Deluxe range. In 2016 Waitrose succumbed and released Waitrose No1, complete with discreet grey and gold packaging and exotica such as creamy, green speckled Matice melons; this is after all, the supermarket that included artichoke hearts in its budget Essentials range. Could it be that Marks & Spencer was rattled? The supermarket that the others may have been emulating upped the ante and brought out its own top-tier Collection range in 2010. To cement the point, in 2018 it followed up with a selection of Our Best Ever products, meaning that for £5.50 (rather than the standard version at £3.50) you can pick up a very grand sounding M&S OBE lasagne.

Welcome to the fourth supermarket tier: betterthan-best, aka even posher.