M&S is “upgrading” 1,000 food products as it looks to stand out from rivals due to the quality of its fresh food.
The improvements follow on from the 1,000 upgrades implemented last year on its 5,000 strong food lines.
Examples of changes include adding more mayonnaise and butter to sandwiches and changing its bread recipe to prevent it from being too firm or too soft.
Use-by dates were also cut from three to two days last year, as M&S Food managing director Alex Freudmann told The Telegraph: “Quality is the most important thing. Everywhere we have a product, we want to have a quality difference versus the market.”
Subscribe to Retail Gazette for free
Sign up here to get the latest news straight into your inbox each morning
The M&S Food boss added that M&S is also using more innovation to improve fresh food quality, including using specially grown tomatoes to prevent soggy bread.
The retailer has been granted exclusive acess to some of the UK’s most high-profile food factories, through partnership with food providers Bakkavor and Greencore, to develop its food.
Greencore has installed state-of-the-art Japanese machinery at one of its sites, which M&S will use to revamp its sushi lines over the next year.
This weekend, M&S became the latest major retailer to experience an online outage as both its website and app went down for several hours on Saturday.
Shoppers on its website were met with a message that read “you can’t shop with us right now”.
The issues follow technical glitches that impacted online deliveries at both Sainsbury’s and Tesco in recent months.
Click here to sign up to Retail Gazette‘s free daily email newsletter
