Quality at Lidl and Aldi

[Steve Firth]

Who said the farms charge in pounds?

[Alan]

In message , "dennis@home" wrote

I bet that 'Coke' is not the original recipe :)

[Steve Firth]

It's not a myth, it's the reality of production and the costs of labour and ammortisation of the costs of machinery. If you weren't so far up your own arse, you would realise this. Prices of less than £10 a litre

*in the UK* are dumping prices that mean that the product cannot possibly be what it is described as.

Since you refuse to give a source for these claims, I can'[t see how you expect anyone to believe them.

The price that I have quoted, I have to remind you, is the wholesale price of extra-virgin olive oil. It is the lowest price paid for a generic product with no special qualities. My olive oil is of DOP status which means that it attracts a higher price.

Your drivellings here, and your refusal to quote your sources, are signs that you don't know what you are talking about.

Perhaps you should consider that there is no way they can sell extra-virgin Italian olive oil at the prices they sell a product which they claim to be EVOO of Italian origin? And perhaps you should admit that they have been caught out mislabelling olive oil in the past?

you should read it?

[Rod]

Not for one moment saying that every bar has them, but the last pint I had north of the border was in a randomly selected establishment in Ayr. And I never really had much difficulty when living in Glasgow, nor when visiting Edinburgh.

Many years earlier, around Fife, now that was a problem. Tartan keg. :-(

[Adrian C]

I quoted that elsewhere in this thread, got to be out of date though - 2005?

Alan - Mr Firth has been shown to take an opposing and insanely difficult view to *anything*. You don't really have to waste your time arguing with his troll-like behaviour.

[Adam Aglionby]

Nope Budweiser US tried to take now unrelated Budweiser CZ to court over trademark infringement, Budweiser Budvar the high quality Czeck beer had been in UK for a short time Americans were launching their soft drink, mean lager, Americans lost.

Budvar is completely different beer and company to Budweiser shandy.

or something like that ...

[Alan]

But Aldi don't doesn't make either of those claims on their bottles. Have you ever set foot inside an Aldi store to see for yourself what they are now selling?

Does the best olive oil actually come from Italy? With anything that is subjective, if your tastes are the same as the reviewer (or expert) than you may understand why he thinks it has quality. If your tastes are different then you may never agree. It much like the 'all real ale must be good' comment made earlier in this thread.

The campaign for real ale have set up official beer tasting committees. One expert on the local tasting group appears not to like one particular beer from a local brewery and doesn't rate it highly. Another group of experts from the same organisation voted it Champion Beer of Britain in two consecutive years. Who is the better judge of quality?

Past deception doesn't mean that they are still doing it.

It appears to say that a few years back it was not possible to tell the difference between the finest quality Italian Extra Virgin Olive Oil and that sold by the discount supermarkets based on both taste and chemical analysis. This implies that the whole system of classifying olive oil was/is complete b******s, as administered by the experts. Or maybe the Spanish s**te is of much better quality that the best Italian oil, even after being abused!

The discount stores only got caught because they were selling their identical tasting product too cheaply and a new chemical test method was invented as a result.

I wonder if a few 'quality suppliers' also used this method of turning s**te into Italian oil but didn't get caught because they charged £25 a bottle.

[Steve Firth]

I've re-instated some of the context that you snipped. Now your smarty-arsey comment doesn't looks so clever, does it? Because I stated that Aldi had been caught out "in the past", didn't I?

The fact that it was a few years ago is irrelevant. The investigations showed that the cost cutting German supermarket were selling mislabelled crap at dumping prices. The fact that they sell similar products at simialr prices today - what does that tell you? That they've reformed their act and have suddenly found Italian farmers who will sell top-quality oil at less than the cost of production? Or that they continue to sell olive oil at dumping prices that cannot possibly be what it is described to be? You might find Occam's razor useful here.

Utter, and complete c*ck. I won't be steam-rollered by a bunch of idiots who seem to think that agreement is more important than getting their facts right. That is not "troll-like behaviour"

[Frank Erskine]

Last time I was in Glasgow was about ten or fifteen years ago, and found myself in a rather hard-looking establishment drinking Belhaven Heavy, also sipping Irn Bru just so that I didn't stand out too much from the crowd. Naturally across the road there was an establishment selling deep-fried pizzæ. I gave that a miss.

[Andy Dingley]

And I believe with a Tesco's own-brand "Vraclav" label on it too.... (or at least was a couple of years back)

You can even get the stuff in America, land of the godless piss-water brewery. However they did have to label it "Crystal" instead.

[<me9]

One of the very few good points of living south of the Thames. That and Harvey's of Lewes. Unfortunately Gales are no longer extant.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

That was certainly the case once. But not now - although you'd have to search out pubs selling decent stuff. Rather like everywhere.

[Alan]

Have you considered that in the real world the price that you are charging for oil may no longer be realistic? It didn't take me more than a few minutes with a popular search engine to find current wholesale prices for both the Spanish and Australian crops. Discount supermarkets can legitimately buy at these prices and sell at the price they are charging and still make margin.

These prices are not dumping prices.

Perhaps there is little future for European olive oil when then Australians will be producing the same quality as you in quantities of

10s of millions of litres in the next few years, and at a quarter of your prices.

[<me9]

Not quite in the same league as Red Barrel though. There's crap and crap!

The Harvey's of Lewes(Sussex) pub I used to frequent had the barrels on the bar. Harvey's had bought the redundant Watney/Tamplin barrels when Watney went keg/tank. They still were marked Watney Tamplin. Many non locals took one look at this label and promptly exited. This left more Old Ale for us!

[Steve Firth]

[Steve Firth]

Bullshit, that's not what it says.

You're now trolling.

[Alan]

Up to now supplying evidence was quite difficult if not impossible and too subjective. The panel results of sensory tests, usually performed by "Stiftung Warentest" (an independent German consumer organization), appeared contestable. Furthermore, nothing negative was detected in the discount oils using the currently applied chemical analysis.

[Bob Eager]

I grew up just up the road from Tamplin's. It was supposed to be quite good, before Watneys got hold of it.

[Steve Firth]

As I said, the above does not say what you claim it says. It states that the panel results of sensory tests "appeared contestable". That is, someone could always argue that the opinion of an expert was flawed or not objective. This does not mean that the opinion was invalid nor that it was "not possible to tell the difference between the finest quality Italian Extra Virgin Olive Oil and that sold by the discount supermarkets". It simply means that a supermarket could throw doubt upon the result of such a test.

The review also states that chemical analysis could not, at the time, detect anything negative. It then goes on to say that at the time of the test actually performed:

"The results of a new and highly precise chemical analysis clearly showed: All four examined supermarket oils from Aldi, Lidl and Edeka were treated thermally. In 2001 the Italian chemist Andrea Serani and two co-workers found a way to prove thermal treatment by means of detecting diglycerides in olive oil: Unstable 1,2-diglycerides transform under high temperatures into more resistant 1,3-diglycerides. Oils are treated thermally to decrease the acid content and sensory weaknesses like rancid odor. If olive oil is thermally treated the total amount of

1,3-diglycerides exceeds the amount of 1,2-diglycerides."

That is, "a few years back" it was perfectly possible to tell both by organoleptic and chemical means the difference between the finest quality Italian Extra Virgin Olive Oil and that sold by the discount supermarkets.

Perhaps you should learn to read?

Now that you have shown that you can respond to a question perhaps you can provide the URL for the claims you are making about the market price of olive oil?

[Frank Erskine]

Which means totally SFA to the vast majority of olive oil consumers.

How does one define 'best quality'? I would have thought that that would be as considered by the consumers, rather than the chemical bullshit as spouted above.

I can't really see the majority of olive oil users setting up spectroscopy laboratories to compare the bottles on offer from Aldi or Waitrose.