Flickr/Frank Kehren. Some rights reserved.
“You must not mention my name or my company. I can’t afford to lose the business.” These are the words of a Sainsbury’s supplier. I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to find farmers affected by what the agricultural industry calls 'uncompensated forecast order cancellations'; when a supermarket back-tracks on an agreed deal at the last minute, leaving suppliers with a huge amount of food and no one to sell to. Farmers aren’t keen to talk about it for fear of being de-listed by their retailers.
This particular Sainsbury’s supplier is a pig farmer. We’ll call him Jack. In September, Jack was left with £6000 worth of unsaleable stock after Sainsbury’s cancelled half their order. They simply returned it to his farm. “That is a huge amount for a small business like ours. And it was all because they had decided to change their Christmas stock without telling us.”
