Which? researchers compared fresh food shelf life across Waitrose, Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Ocado, finding one supermarket’s products expired soonest
It can be frustrating when you buy food and there’s only a day or two left to eat it(Image: coldsnowstorm via Getty Images)
With the cost of the weekly shop higher than ever, avoiding food waste has never been more essential. While dry goods such as pasta and spices can sit in your cupboards for months, fresh produce is an entirely different matter.
There’s nothing more frustrating than receiving a full weekly shop delivery, checking the dates and discovering you only have a day or two before products expire. According to a new investigation by Which?, one surprising supermarket emerged as the worst culprit.
During a two-week period, 12 mystery shoppers placed identical online orders of 29 fresh and perishable items across each of the six major supermarkets – Asda, Morrisons, Ocado, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose – assessing more than 2,000 items in total.
Researchers calculated the number of hours remaining from the point of delivery to midnight on the use-by date for each item, before working out an average figure per supermarket.
Which supermarket had the shortest shelf life for food?
Waitrose was found to have the shortest average shelf life of all six supermarkets at 7.7 days, performing worst across several products, including scones, bread, fresh pasta sauce, fresh tagliatelle, houmous and pork sausages.
As an example, two packs of Waitrose beef mince and a pack of chicken thighs arrived with a use-by date the very day after delivery. Which? also discovered that Tesco delivered fresh groceries with an average of 8.8 days shelf life remaining.
One customer received fresh pasta sauce and pork sausages both with 3.4 days of life left, while Tesco’s online shelf life guide states shoppers should expect a week for the sauce and at least five days’ life on the sausages.
At Sainsbury’s, the average shelf life was 10.2 days, with three items – sweetcorn and two packs of basil – carrying a best-before date on the day of delivery. Ocado had some longer-lasting products, including two packs of ham with more than 20 days left.
Despite this, one shopper received basil that was within date but black and wilted.
Morrisons performed well overall, though one substituted raspberry trifle had less than four hours until it expired. By contrast, Which?found one shopper received houmous with 24.38 days left.
Which supermarket was best?
It was Asda that came out on top for delivering the freshest groceries, according to the researchers. Five shoppers received beef mince with at least 18 days left before its use-by date, while one pack of cod had seven days remaining.
A pasta sauce had an average of 33.6 days remaining, compared with just 12.2 days when purchased from Waitrose – despite the Waitrose version costing 23p more.
All of the supermarkets featured in the research were contacted for comment by Which? However,. Asda, Morrisons and Sainsbury’s failed to provide an official response. A spokesperson for Ocado said: “We are proud of our Fresh+ promise, making us the only UK online grocery retailer to offer a life guarantee on all fresh products. Our promise guarantees a minimum number of days of freshness on products ranging from fruit and veg to bread and milk, ensuring customers can trust Ocado to deliver the freshness they are looking for on each and every delivery. If customers aren’t 100% happy with a product’s freshness, they can easily arrange an immediate refund online or through our app.”
A spokesperson for Tesco said: “We work hard to select the freshest items with the longest expiry dates for all our Grocery Home Shopping delivery and Click + Collect orders and we highlight any items that have a shorter shelf life than we would like as part of our Freshness Guarantee. If customers are not happy with any items at the time of delivery or collection, they can hand them back for a full refund.”
A spokesperson for Waitrose said: “We are committed to offering the freshest and highest quality products, reflected in our growing online grocery sales. And in response to increasing customer demand for products with simpler ingredients, we have removed preservatives from some of the items in this analysis where they are common, including our houmous. Our online grocery pickers are trained to choose the longest dated products they can, and our most recent customer survey showed that the vast majority of our online customers rated the shelf life of our products as good or excellent.”
