The great salad box swizz

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Pricey fare: Whole Foods salad bar can be deceptively expensive

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• Charles Campion archive

London's new destination retail experience is undoubtedly the most lavish food shop in Britain. Whole Foods Market in Kensington spreads over three floors and 80,000sq ft, and there's a daunting array of products from the American supermarket giant which claims to be the world leader in natural and organic food.

Now that it's had a couple of weeks to bed in, I went along to see if Whole Foods lives up to the hysterical hype. The store opened with a fanfare on 6 June, astonishing shoppers with its sheer scale, but something of a backlash is growing over its pricing policy. It's on the ground floor, in an area set aside for takeaway food, that alarm bells begin to ring.

There you are encouraged to help yourself to what you fancy, then at the till the box is weighed and you are charged accordingly. There are big signs making it clear that you will be charged £1.79 per 100g, whatever you pick, and asking that you don't sample the dishes.

Everything is open and above board without a hint of sharp practice but this way of doing things really is a bit of a swizz.

First, I put together three dollops of rather good salads - a coleslaw, a pasta salad, and one with artichoke hearts - it weighed in at 235g and cost £4.21; I also boxed up a spoonful of rice with some dhal makhani, chicken sag and chicken korma - that carton weighed 500g and cost £8.95.

The salads were fine. The curry was a match for any high street Indian restaurant. But imagine if you were having a dinner party. If you were unwise enough to buy a 2kg box of rice to go with some curries, it would cost you £35.80.

The salads were varied, fresh and feature imaginative combinations, while the cooked dishes are well made and appetising; it's just that the high prices for the inexpensive ingredients can take you unawares.

What about the rest of the shop? Fresh produce is set out in the basement and the range of fruit and vegetables is enormous. Prices vary from "good" - UK asparagus, £5.96 per kg; huge, fresh globe artichokes, £1.99 each - to the more eye-watering, such as 30g of micro sprouts that will set you back £3.49; or the fresh wood blewit mushrooms at £29.99 per kg.

But it is not all bad news on the price front. Take the butchery section, which offers " dryaged" beef. You can see some great-looking gnarled beef rib joints in glass cabinets above the area; the meat in the counter cabinet which is described as "dry-aged boneless sirloin" on the ticket looks altogether pinker and fresher but is keenly priced at £15.99 per kg.

When it comes to cheese, Whole Foods Market has done an exceptional job. Pricing is not overly aggressive, and with 350 different cheeses on offer this is certainly among the most comprehensive selections in Britain.

The fish counter is large and the seafood looked fresh. I noticed a ticket reading "Wild Trout: £14.99 per kg" stuck into a display of large (each between 3kg and 4kg) silver fish. The chirpy fishmonger said they were from "off the Cornish coast".

We then had a short argument about just what these fish were. Salmon (salmo salmo) is a different fish to trout (salmo trutta), and to make matters more complicated there is also a sea trout - a trutta that has decided to live out at sea for a bit - usually caught when they're returning to fresh water. The only accurate way to tell a sea trout from a salmon is to count the number of scales along the adipose line - impractical at a fish counter.

When I check with the management it turns out that these are genuine sea trout and "sea" has been omitted from the ticket by mistake. This makes them impressively inexpensive. All of which illustrates the scale of the biggest problem facing this store: the staff at a traditional fishmongers, or butchers, or bakers, or even a city centre food hall know their stuff, but such expertise is in short supply. Good staff must be hard to find especially for such a large shop.

Despite public perception, Whole Foods Market makes no claims that all its products are organic, and says the amount of organic produce differs from week to week, depending on availability. In the fruit and veg section the balance between "organic" or " conventional" looks to be about 50:50. But the impression left with the customers is that all the food here is somehow better and worthier.

There is also the question of food miles: is flying a small box of mixed salad leaves from Italy to London good for the planet?

By the time I left, I couldn't shake off the distinct whiff of spin, albeit highly polished American spin, about this food theme park.

But in order to capture the hearts and minds of London's foodies it will have to transcend the rhetoric and sort out some of its pricing.

Whole Foods Market, 63-97 Kensington High Street, W8 (020 7368 4500). Open from Monday to Saturday: 8am to 10pm; Sunday noon to 6pm.

 

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