Tesco’s superstore in Bury St Edmunds has become the only place in the whole country where the company sells Silver Spoon granulated sugar – in a move that has been labelled a sweetener to local shoppers.
There was outrage in March when Tesco announced it would no longer stock the UK product, which uses mainly Suffolk-grown sugar beet, instead opting for Tate & Lyle sugar produced from sugar cane grown thousands of miles away in Belize.
In Bury St Edmunds, the move was considered especially farcical as the Tesco supermarket lies less than 400m from the British Sugar factory, which houses its sister company Silver Spoon’s main distribution depot.
Now, Tesco has confirmed the Bury store does stock Silver Spoon granulated sugar again – but customers searching for it in nearby Stowmarket or Cambridge supermarkets or even smaller Tesco Express stores in Bury will leave empty handed.
The supermarket giant would not say whether the exception for Bury had always been intended or whether it was bowing in the face of local pressure.
“The store is quite close to the factory,” a spokeswoman from Tesco said. “It’s still continuing to sell Silver Spoon. That’s just one store. It’s not that the decision has been reversed nationwide.”
Tesco never stopped selling all Silver Spoon products, but had stopped selling the granulated sugar. At the time the decision was publicised in March, Tesco said it scrutinised proposed cost increases from suppliers “to avoid any unjustified or unnecessary increases in price”.
The chairman of the Bury St Edmunds Chamber of Commerce Matt Moss said the March decision was a “shocking stance” for Tesco to take.
“I think it’s detrimental not just to the Bury St Edmunds plant but British Sugar as a whole,” he said.
Regarding the decision for just Bury to stock the product, he said: “It’s probably just the pressure of the media where it’s been pointed out quite blatantly the proximity of the factory to the store. My view would be that’s where the decision has come through, not any other economic reason.
“In reality that’s fine for those that live locally to Bury St Edmunds but people in Stowmarket and Cambridge aren’t going to travel to Bury St Edmunds to get that. They will just have to take what appears on the shelves in Tesco.”
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