Sainsbury’s spends £220million to ‘keep prices low’ for customers

Sainsbury’s will have forked out £220m to keep prices down for shoppers by the end of this financial year, according to its boss.

The supermarket’s ‘Aldi price-match’ initiative — which it applies to everyday items like carrots, chicken breasts and milk — and discounts for Nectar card owners, are the main price-cutting initiatives contributing to the figure.

Speaking to the Mail on Sunday, Simon Roberts the chief executive of Sainsbury’s, who worked his way up the food chain from the shop floor, said: “Our customers can now buy a whole weekly shop for the same price as Aldi.”

The supermarket’s intense focus on prices is a prominent part of Roberts’s ‘Food First Strategy’, which last week saw the company announce the winding down of its retail banking division.

The same strategy lay behind the broader restructuring that has taken place across the grocer.

“We have saved £1.3bn of costs. We had to make some tough decisions. We decided not to run counters [for cheese, meat and fish] anymore, and we reduced the number of office locations and consolidated them,” Roberts said.

Roberts’s commitment to the new strategy means all profits from Sainsbury’s other businesses, like Argos, Tu clothing and Habitat, are now invested back into the food side of the company.