Iceland have helpfully provided curious readers with a
potted biography of CEO Malcolm Walker, where his founding of the chain,
its rapid growth, its loss of direction, and his cavalry-like return to save
the day are all dutifully presented. But one thing is missing, and that item is
his relationship with reality and his ability to open mouth and
insert boot in short order.
As I pointed
out yesterday, while the head man at the Co-Op was being of generous
candour in admitting that retailers had nobody else but themselves to blame for
the horsemeat scandal, Walker went on The
Andy Marr Show (tm) and tried
to dump the whole business on local Government, demonstrating a lack of
knowledge on what his target actually did.
For starters, local Government does not buy food for hospitals
or prisons, as Walker asserted. Nor was his recollection particularly good when
it came to how much horsemeat had got into supermarkets (he said it was merely
cross contamination, but several retailers had found significant amount of
horse flesh in their products, as well as those manufactured under other
labels).
Nor has Walker shown any sign so far of recanting, but he
may have to reconsider his stance following the attention he is now receiving
in the press, especially that from the obedient hackery of the legendarily foul
mouthed Paul Dacre at the Daily Mail,
where Walker’s assertion that Iceland does not sell “cheap food” has
been exposed as a sham in an unflattering product comparison.
The Mail kicks off
by quoting Walker’s words “I don’t eat
value food because it doesn’t contain much meat” back at him, followed by a
table comparing the pork content of Iceland sausages with that of the cheapest
offerings from Asda, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Tesco. The latter four range
from 32% to 40% - but Iceland lags well
behind all of them at just 27%.
Oh dear. And it gets worse: Walker also delivered the
observation “OK, you can say we haven’t
been testing for horse. Well, why would we? We don’t test for hedgehog either”.
Quite apart from testing for horse being in the category of the bleeding
obvious, his flippancy, coming on the back of showing serious ignorance of the
subject, is not going to benefit the Iceland brand one bit.
Some of those comments made about local authorities may
provoke more than condemnation if Walker doesn’t have second thoughts and
withdraw them, especially if he can’t stand up his talk of “dodgy
cutting houses and backstreet manufacturers”. And catering suppliers might
not take kindly to having their reputation trashed in an effort to get the
public to “look over there”.
I wonder if Malcolm Walker
has heard of Gerald Ratner.
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