Shops / Features
Supermarkets open next to supermarkets
Bristol Food Policy Council wants more intervention into where new supermarkets can open, something that at the moment is obviously not working.
It is with bitter irony that on the same day that the Bristol Food Connections festival begins, the city gets yet another supermarket.
Morrisons Local opens at 9am this morning on College Green, just a few doors down from a Tesco Extra.
From Saturday to Monday, the new supermarket will overlook a forgotten foods market as part of Food Connections, representing endangered foods from across the UK – just the kind of produce big supermarkets are killing off.
In Broadmead, another new supermarket is opening almost next door to another Tesco, this time a Sainsbury’s Local only a few hundred yards away from another Sainsbury’s further down the road opposite Cabot Circus.
Bristol is certainly not lacking for choice for soggy lunchtime sandwiches for rushed city centre office workers.
The Who Feeds Bristol? report in 2011 showed the big four supermarkets of Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrissons had grown the number of stores they owned in the West of England from 19 to 76. This has without doubt now hit three figures.
Bristol Food Policy Council says: “While there is always a place for supermarkets in the food industry, Bristol must be strategic in its retail planning; controlling supermarket expansion and only allowing new sites where it will be beneficial for the local community.”
With new supermarkets opening almost next door to existing ones, a major rethink is urgently needed.
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