James Rowe: We tasked mystery shoppers from across the country to help us find out what's really going on with online grocery deliveries. Here's what we found out.
Hello and welcome to Which? Shorts, your free weekly insight into Which? Magazine, as well as our Money, Tech, Travel and Gardening titles, too. Today, I'm bringing you a piece that our senior retail researcher, Hannah Walsh, wrote for the September issue of Which? Magazine all about online grocery deliveries.
There's no doubt that this service has become a convenient way to do a supermarket shop, but not having full control over what you buy – or indeed its freshness – can be frustrating when you're delivered underwhelming-looking goods. So, we used a group of mystery shoppers to order food from some of the UK's biggest retailers to find out how they stack up and how the quality of their groceries compares to one another. Here's Hannah's piece adapted for the podcast, this week read by me, James Rowe.
When you place an online grocery order, there are a lot of things you can control, like when you get your items and how you stick to a budget. But we all put our trust in supermarkets to pick and deliver the freshest groceries that will last, and often end up disappointed. In our latest supermarket survey, 16% of 519 people who reported frustrations with their most recent online supermarket delivery said receiving perishable items with a very short shelf life was their top frustration.
And with more grocery price inflation anticipated this year, every pound spent at the supermarket matters, and food waste will get even harder to stomach. So, we've investigated how supermarkets stack up on grocery freshness to help you get the most out of your shop.
To find out which supermarket typically delivers the freshest food, we recruited 12 mystery shoppers from across Great Britain to order the same list of 29 fresh groceries from Asda, Morrisons, Ocado, Sainsbury's, Tesco and Waitrose. More than 2,000 perishable goods were ordered and delivered. We totaled up the hours remaining from the time of delivery to midnight on the use-by date for each item, converted this to days, and calculated an average per supermarket. We also included a handful of items with best-before dates in our orders, but these weren't included in the average for each supermarket as these are about quality rather than safety.
Asda was the freshest supermarket, with perishable items that had use-by dates lasting an average of 11 days from delivery. High-end Waitrose delivered the least fresh groceries, with use-by dates lasting just 7.7 days on average, followed by Tesco with an average of 8.8 days. For Morrisons, it was 10.4 days on average; Ocado, too, was 10.4; and Sainsbury's was 10.2.
When we looked at just the best-before dates, Waitrose still had the shortest average shelf life and Asda, still, the longest. Waitrose has been the most expensive supermarket in our monthly supermarket price comparison of about 90 grocery items every month for two years now, so it's especially disappointing to see that customers are paying more for groceries that won't last. Asda, on the other hand, is consistently the cheapest of the big supermarkets in our analysis.
Across the stores, seven items were delivered on their use-by date or best-before date, including a substituted raspberry trifle from Morrisons that had just under four hours left until it expired, and a toffee sundae from Tesco with around 13 hours left. Having to dig straight into a dessert may seem like a trifling issue – unless it was bought with future dinner plans in mind.
Meat and fish were the most expensive items in our shopping list, but that didn't mean you were guaranteed the time to use them. Three packs of beef mince – one from Morrisons and two from Waitrose – and two packs of chicken thighs – from Sainsbury's and Waitrose – arrived with a use-by date the day after delivery, and two packs of cod – from Asda and Tesco – needed to be used within two days.
Our shoppers shared numerous examples of food that arrived damaged or looking past its best, despite being within its use-by or best-before date. One pack of M&S basil from Ocado was limp and wilted. Multiple people reported freshness concerns with pre-cut carrot batons with a number of supermarkets, noting carrots looked slimy, wet or indeed manky. One person received a pack of beef mince from Waitrose that had opened and was, quote, "leaking a bit of myoglobin" inside the bag; and another was left in a sticky mess with an open pot of pineapple from Morrisons that had leaked onto other packets. Split or open packaging was reported on a wide variety of items, including a curry ready meal, a toffee sundae, mozzarella, Fromage Frais pots, bread and milk.
Tomato and mascarpone pasta sauce had the biggest difference in the average number of days left to use it between supermarkets. From Asda, it arrived with an average of 33.6 days until it would be past the use-by date; but from Waitrose, this was just 12.2 days, compared to the overall average of 21.7 days. When you consider its cost, it's clear that Waitrose shoppers would be getting less value. The mascarpone sauce is 23p more expensive from Waitrose compared to Asda, but you get around a third of the time to use it.
Morrisons' own-label houmous was the longest-lasting, with an average use-by term of 22.5 days, while Waitrose houmous arrived with just 3.84 days left on average, again compared to 11.54 days on average.
We saw some large variations even with best-before dates. Cathedral City grated mature cheddar cheese had the longest average days until the best-before date, with 44.3 days; but one of our volunteers received a pack from Sainsbury's with 16.6 days left, while two others got packs from Asda and Sainsbury's with 50 days remaining.
So, is there anything you can do about this? Well, most supermarkets have a freshness policy with measures in place to support shoppers. This could be guaranteeing the shelf life, stating the typical life of a particular product, or flagging short-life products via email or via the driver on delivery. But we found that items don't always meet these guarantees or the expected shelf life, and reporting of short-life products can be patchy.
So, be sure to check the email or receipt you receive on the day of delivery. Sometimes this can be found in your online account to see if there's anything with short shelf life that you won't use or doesn't meet the expected shelf life promise.
Also, take your time unpacking at home, paying particular attention to products like meat, fish, herbs, prepared fruit and veg, and ready meals. If you're not happy, reject these at the doorstep to get a refund. Once your items have been delivered, you can still get a refund on anything that is damaged or out of date.
Now, here's what the supermarkets told us. Ocado, Tesco and Waitrose emphasized their commitments to freshness. Waitrose said it removed preservatives from some of the items in our analysis, including houmous, and trained pickers to choose the longest-dated products. Ocado went on to say its Fresh+ promise guarantees a minimum number of days of freshness on a range of fresh items, while Tesco said it highlights items with a shorter shelf life than the freshness guarantee. Asda, Morrisons and Sainsbury's didn't comment.
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