FMCG Giant Unilever has announced that it will be selling pasta sauces Ragu and Bertolli for £1.25B, putting yet more pressure on the average consumer’s shopping basket.
“I don’t know how we’ll cope,” worries Jane Saunders, 37. “First the price of bread went up by 10p, and now this. We’re really going to have to cut back on the bolognese.”
The big supermarkets were baffled when Unilever first approached them. “It seemed like a big jump to us,” reports a Sainsbury’s insider, “particularly as the price of a jar of Ragu was previously only around £1.80. We managed to negotiate them down from £1.5B per jar, but they wouldn’t budge from £1.25B, and we had to pass the higher cost on to the consumer.”
This is not the first big price jump in recent months, with Burton’s raising the price of their Cadbury’s Fingers and Jammie Dodgers to around £350M a packet. It remains to be seen how much price inflation the average household can withstand.
Hardly Business Review 