50 of the world's best food blogs

Sourced from The Independant Newspaper

Change the way you cook and eat for ever with Times Online's guide to the world's tastiest food blogs

This list comprises 50 of our favourite food blogs but is by no means exhaustive. Times Online invites users to submit their favourites for a follow-up article using the comment box below.
1. Orangette The ultimate food lovers' blog. The seductive powers of food writing are not to be underestimated - Molly Wizenberg’s words even helped to find her a husband. I cooked for almost 12 hours straight after discovering this blog - recipes range from the simple to the delectable: tomato sauce, hasselback potatoes, chickpea salad, chocolate granola. Wizenberg redeems the most uninteresting food – her cabbage gratin is one of my culinary hits of the year.
Molly Wizenberg shares food secrets in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview
2. Cannelle et Vanille The recipes say it all: salted caramel ice-cream, roasted fig frozen mousse, lemon verbena with chamomile crème brulee. This visually stunning site was started by Spanish pastry chef Aran Goyoaga in January last year to satisfy her career-break cravings. Even a snacky peek explains its overnight success.
3. The Wednesday Chef New York-based Luisa Weiss started this blog as a way of documenting her trawl through clippings of recipes from the New York and LA Times. A mix of recipes and humorous anecdotes - her boyfriend thinks he is pre-hypertensive so she reduces the salt to avoid confronting the issue of male hypochrondria - it's a charming blog packed with information (indeed, a whole 700 words about coleslaw).
4. Delicious Days Authored by Munich-based Nicky Stich, this blog has a huge following, currently at number 127 in Technorati’s Top 100 blogs (the highest ranking food blog.) Well-conceived, with an international flavour but healthy dose of German influence and easy to navigate sections including a food news feed. DD features the author’s own recipes, as well as adaptations from other cookbooks. An invaluable article offers tips for budding food bloggers.
5. David Lebovitz Another megablog, this witty food reportage by the established cookbook author and ex-pastry chef David Lebovitz has up to 25,000 visitors a day. Now based in Paris, he covers recipes, restaurants and interviews with other foodie heavyweights. Head to his FAQ page for all the culinary secrets on Paris you could wish for.
David Lebovitz reveals more secrets in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview
6. Chez Pim Not much of a foodie secret, blog celebrity and big-hitter Pim quit her Silicon Valley job in 2005 to pursue her foodie calling. And a good move it was too; more than 142,000 regular readers have signed up for daily doses of her recipes, restaurant reviews and authoritative all-round food comment. My favourite recent post? An election recipe; chicken soup for the American soul.
7. Matt Bites When blog photos are taken by a professional photographer, it really shows – see his recent molasses-glazed acorn squash, for example. One of the select number of male food bloggers, Matt is charming and humorous, and has a recent Martha Stewart TV appearance to boot.
Matt reveals more food secrets in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview
8. Serious Eats Practically everything you need to know about food can be found on this multi-contributor food website, started by New York Times journalist Ed Levine. The focus is on American foods such as hot dogs, there are restaurant and gadget reviews, food videos and recipes, including an easy recipe every afternoon to inspire that evening’s dinner.
9. 101 Cookbooks One of the most established food blogs, five years old and counting; this is the chronicle of a blogger with an overindulged habit of buying cookbooks. This Californian blog is primarily a conduit for savoury recipes, mostly vegetarian, and using natural foods - the most popular include caramelised tofu, black bean brownies and lemon-scented quinoa salad. It's technologically literate, too, with i-Phone compatible recipes, and there is a convenient index of recipes by ingredient, and by category (ie gluten-free, cookies, drinks etc).
10. Smitten Kitchen A combination of writing/photographer skills add up to culinary excellence in this well-established blog, covering recipes cooked in author Deb Perelman’s tiny New York kitchen. A Facebook group, Flickr photo pool, and Twitter following – this is a slick operation.
11. Chubby Hubby Everything you need to know about Asian food can be found on this blog, where Singaporean-based author Aun Koh writes about street food, restaurants and recipes, with charming references to his partner in kitchen crime, his wife S.
12. Chocolate and Zucchini If you haven’t heard of multi-lingual Chocolate and Zucchini by now, you’ve obviously been living in gastronomic purgatory. If reading for recipes doesn’t always appeal, Paris-based Clotilde Dusoulier has recently started a series on French food idioms, and her blog is full of Parisian gastronomic delights, with a book to accompany it, appropriately titled Edible Adventures in Paris.
Read our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers Q&A with Clotilde Dusoulier
13. Rambling Spoon As Asia correspondent for Gourmet magazine, "Food is everything we are," says travelling journalist Karen Coates. The last few months have covered Thanksgiving in Thailand, a round-up of food-related paintings in The Louvre, Paris, and haggis in Edinburgh.
14. The Pioneer Woman Cooks Home-cooking and home-schooling Ree Drummond is a real-life frontier-living cattle rancher. With Little House on the Prairie warmth and passion for the hearth to match, Pioneer Woman has garnered a huge following from responsive readers - almost 800 comments on her latest "Thanksgiving, Deconstructed" post. Impressive.
15. Dorie Greenspan With more than 20 years food writing experience, multi-cookbook author Dorie Greenspan has gourmet credentials. Her passions are pastry and Paris - this continental commuter (between New York, Connecticut and Paris) is an authority on all things bake-related.
Dorie Greenspan reveals more secrets in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview
16. Artisan Sweets Another blog for the sweet-toothed reader where even beautifully-photographed Rice Krispie Treats can have the reader salivating and running to late-night Tesco for a stash of ingredients. Savoury recipes also feature on this blog, as well as useful video demonstrations, such as how to make perfect puff pastry.
17. Eating Asia A bog-standard visit to Chinatown will never suffice after you have started reading this collaboration between seasoned writer Robyn Eckhardt and photographer David Hagerman. This is one of the most colourful blogs and its photos of ageing street vendors and vibrant street markets from all over Asia are inspiring.
18. Nordljus A bilingual food journal, written in both English and Japanese, the primary language of Nordljus is photography, with snapper Keiko capturing delectable images such as truffle honey ice cream with hazelnut dacquoise and Seville orange sponge, as well as sharing recipes and her musings on an English culinary life.
19. The Kitchn Part of the hugely popular interiors blog Apartment Therapy, this satisfies all manner of kitchen cravings; featuring stylish kitchen tours, recipes and answers to such burning questions as "How to clean a toaster" and "What is the difference between non-stick and cast iron pans?"
20. Becks & Posh Named from the Cockney rhyming slang for nosh, English ex-pat Sam Breach is currently taking part in a self-imposed food challenge to "eat local". Evangelical about eating regional and seasonal produce and infused with a healthy dose of English humour, Breach has clearly adopted California as her home, with food tales and recipes that ooze influence from the Sunshine State.
21. Simply Recipes - superb range of personal recipes
22. Sticky Rice - exotic street-food docu-drama in Hanoi
Sticky Rice reveals more secrets in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview
23. Souvlaki for the Soul - summery Byzantine bites from Sydney
24. Bitten: New York Times - news, views and recipes from the Big Apple's kitchens
25. Baking Bites - homemade cookies, muffins and much more
26. La Tartine Gourmande - gorgeous photos, scrummy food
27. Gluten Free Girl - wheat-free wonders and tips for celiacs
28. Steamy Kitchen - modern Asian cuisine by media savvy blogger
Read more secrets from Steamy Kitchen in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview
29. What's for Lunch Honey - global menu from Germany
30. Cream Puffs in Venice - Italian influenced mainly sweet-toothed posts
31. Egg Beater - insightful look at the life of a London-based chef
32. Homesick Texan - a New Yorker recreates the much-missed cuisine of her Southern childhood
33. The Traveler's Lunchbox - great writing served up with recipes
Read more secrets in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview
34. Joy the Baker - home-baked goodies from an LA-based twentysomething
Joy the Baker reveals more secrets in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview
35. Cook and Eat - striking photography and a smooth to move-about layout
36. Lucullian Delights - appetising Italian recipes from a Tuscan-based Swede
37. Café Fernando - Turkish delights from Istanbul
38. The Food Section - read all about food news
39. Use Real Butter - tales from an Asian foodie’s life in the Colorado Rockies

MY PROFILE

Read more secrets in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview

40. Tea and Cookies - charming stories accompany yummy recipes
41. Amateur Gourmet - funny writing with a useful "how to" section
42. Wild Yeast - all about bread
43. Tartelette - stunning photography and styling define this popular dessert blog
44. NYC Nosh - reviews of favourite old-school restaurants in New York
45. Not Eating Out in New York - records the rare pursuit of home-cooking in the city
46. Cooksister - South African recipes from a London-based expat
47. Artichoke: Best of British Food - well written seasonal food posts and events
48. Grab Your Fork - Sydney reviews and recipes including a useful restaurant finder
49. A Slice of Cherry Pie - home cooking from the Home Counties
Read more secrets in our exclusive Meet the Food Bloggers interview
50. The Bitten Word - a charming duo tackle recipes from a back-catalogue of food magazines.
Lynne Robinson has her own design blog at http://www.teaforjoy.blogspot.com/ which features tea shop reviews and a tea of the week.

Food fixation is the real enemy - not Fray Bentos

If the outrage caused by Delia's tinned mince teaches us one thing, it is that we can think too much about what we eat.

I personally applauded Delia for swimming against the tide with her book How To Cheat at Cooking (although that was before I saw her telly programme). I was able to gloss over the fact that she advocates putting frozen mash in a chocolate cake. I cannot imagine the conditions that would make it necessary either to freeze mash or to put it in a cake, short of a nuclear war.
She did more, with her tins of mince, than reject a freshness-fascism popular among the organic-box classes. She flew in the face of the Office for National Statistics, which has found, for the first time since the 80s, both ready meals and microwaves out of favour. This is not just, ahem, a flash in the pan, the emphasis on cooking from scratch. It is reflected in broad national trends. An optimist would say that we're seeing a new era of healthy eating. I would say, well, possibly ...

The reason I was pro-Delia, despite frozen mash-gate, was that she appeared to be standing against two strains of rhetoric that dominate the way we talk about food. The first is a kind of food purity - that we have to know the provenance of everything we put into our mouths, and be able to account for its treatment in life and the treatment of those who tended it. This is a crucible, or a saucepan if you'd rather, where laudable and defensible intentions meet self-indulgence, with the result that even the best of it tastes a bit off.

Humane farming and fair trade ought to be integral to one's enjoyment of food, sure, but not because they make things taste nicer. Rather, because a stain on your conscience would dim your appetite - I think many chefs and food writers have been flogging the free-range cause on the basis of taste, and the result is that we somehow think food that has been treated in an ugly way will taint the purity of our temple-bodies. This leads to an exaggerated horror of putting anything canned or even minced into our precious mouths, as if the very process of modern food preservation were really just glorified dog-foodising. Well, so what if people want to eat fresh food? You're right, of course; it's not the freshness I object to, it's the princess-and-the-pea preciousness.

Then there's the second curve, the demon twin of the slow-food movement - that to have a great surfeit of time in a household, long enough endlessly to pick over the bones of your best-end carcass, is as much a status symbol now as anything so simple as a car has ever been. Broadsheet supplements have been talking a lot lately of the ultimate status symbol - four children. Sure, that is among people who would have them privately educated, in which case you might just as well have four racehorses who never win. But it is also an emphasis on time: we are the sort of family who can chuck man-hours at an enterprise like breeding. We need not dirty our hands with regular work. We have staff, etc.

It's part of the same time-rich trend, I would argue, that privileges the marinated lamb shank so immeasurably far above the Fray Bentos pie that it is out of all proportion with the way they actually taste. Again, our horror of the instant edible has veiled snobbery in it; it is not entirely grounded in respect for food and its producers, if it is grounded in those things at all.

The upshot of this is not simply a dip in microwave sales and some toxic outrage raining down upon cheaty Delia. The way we have conflated so many different impulses in our consideration of food - the political, the personal, the hierarchical, the altruistic and the snobbish, the selfless and the self-important, the environmental piety and the calorie counting, the far-sighted and the simply vain - have, as you might expect, led us to take food way too seriously.

Just take one example in this week's news - medics are, apparently, worried about "drunkorexics", which is to say people (generally young women) who offset the calories they imbibe through booze by not eating during the day. Now, people with eating disorders frequently suffer from other addictions - among them, to alcohol - but that has been common knowledge for decades. There is no new evidence here at all; a story like this is simply an example of this persistent urge we have to pathologise our relationship with food.

Obesity only ever comes in "epidemics". "Orexia", I believe, will soon be an umbrella term for any life-threatening disease that only exists in the imaginations of cultural pundits. It will be very annoying for actual anorexics, but they will be too busy not eating to notice. We aggrandise simple things - greed on the one hand, dieting or even plain calorie-counting on the other - because we cannot otherwise justify the feverish seriousness with which we approach this straightforward business.

Ready-meals aren't the enemy, nor is tinned mince - we feel injured by scummy products because they remind us that it is just food, a diversion. It will never make intellectual demands on us. Gordon Ramsay can have as many Michelin stars as he likes, but he's never going to win a Nobel prize. We should all eat a frozen faggot every now and then as a mark of respect for the life of the mind.

Sourced from The Guardian

Top 10 free cooking Apps

Cooking has always been a past time that’s involved tools, whether it be cookbooks, scraps of paper holding generations old recipes, modern appliances. The apps found within theiTunes App Store have become one of the best aides within the kitchen.
1. Epicurious. Containing more than 25000 recipes, Epicurious is a great cooking application for beginners and experience chefs alike. The recipes are organized in a neat manner and the instructions are easy enough to follow. But the best part is: Epicurious is absolutely free. iPad of professional recipes from the pages of Bon Appetit and the now-defunct Gourmet magazine (Website).


2. American Recipes. In the mood to make a delicious American Recipe? Find delicious Traditional American Recipes with the American Recipe App. With this handy app you can find recipes such as Baked Stuffed Shrimp, Crab Quiche Lorraine, Chicken Spaghetti, Pizza Beer Beef and even a recipe for Honey Ribs. The App will show you the ingredients needed for the recipe as well as the steps required to complete your culinary masterpiece

3. Dinner Spinner is a Free app for the iPhone andiPod Touch that lets you spin your way to a great meal. If you don’t know what you want eat or cook, give it a spin! Tap what type of dish you want to make, what ingredient sounds good and how much time you have to prepare it. It’s Fun, it’s Quick and it’s Easy!

4. BigOven is a pretty intriguing option among the many iPhone recipe apps you can download at the App Store. It has more than 170,000 individual recipes, so BigOven may have more recipes than any other iPhone app. Designed from the ground-up for the iPad, this new BigOven app lets you look up virtually any recipe by title, keyword, or ingredient. It easily builds a grocery list from one or more recipes. It helps you get unstuck for dinner with great ideas, and shows you photos and ratings from real cooks. Together with www.bigoven.com, you can post your own recipes and photos online, and then have them easily available in a convenient application on your kitchen countertop.

5. Whole Foods Market Recipes app. For a free recipe app, Whole Foods Market Recipes (Free) includes a good amount of content. The app has a solid collection of recipes, and features like a shopping list and the ability to search by ingredients you already have on hand make the Whole Foods app a winner. Whole Foods did a nice job with this recipe app, especially the interface. It’s nice to look at and easy to browse, and it was very speedy over a WiFi connection

6. EasyRecipe This Android cooking app provides you with around 10,000 recipes of popular dishes and the cooking skills neeeded to prepare those dishes. It allows you to browse, search and save any recipe you like on your Android phone. The app has three main features – search, favorites, and recipe index. When searching for a dish, you can just enter an ingredient that you would like to cook and the app will list down all the dishes that use that ingredient. Select a dish and the app will display an introduction about the dish and other information including cooking skills, ingredients and nutritional facts related to the dish. If you like a particular dish, you can save it to your favorites and the app will store it on your phone allowing you access to it later on. The recipe index includes more than 10,000 popular dishes and their nutritional value, arranged by most popular, main ingredients, categories, cuisines, courses, appliances, and holidays

7. The Cook’s Illustrated application allows users to search for a recipe for specific items, as well as navigate through the available recipes in the app by category. Categories of recipes represented in the app include: Vegetables, Salads, Pasta, Stews, Meats, Grilling, and many others. Once you select a certain category you then have to select a country such as “French” or “Indian” before you are taken to a page of recipes. The recipes are exceptionally well organized, making it easy to find a specific recipe within the application fairly quickly.  What’s really great about Cook’s Illustrated, however, is that recipes come with videos to show you how it’s all done. Many recipes are provided free of charge, but a subscription is necessary to unlock all the member’s only recipes.

8. How to Cook Everything app, This free iPhone cooking app is an incredibly useful tool which includes 100+ basic recipes, including many best Thanksgiving recipes. If this is your first time preparing a Thanksgiving meal, you’ll find the timing charts for defrosting and roasting turkeys are particularly helpful. The app’s interface is pretty sleek, although there are no pictures to accompany the recipes. Even so, the app does include an integrated cooking timer and shopping list. How to Cook Everything also has more cooking instruction than nearly any other recipe app, with videos on everything from how to sharpen knives to how to roast a chicken.

9. The Woman’s Day Cooking Assistant app brings you recipes from the editors of the Woman’s Day magazine. The app has a list of featured articles about food with accompanying recipes, and the articles change periodically. As with other recipe apps, you can either type in a keyword to search or you can browse through them by category (Cuisine, Main Ingredient, Holiday Recipes, Budget Recipes, Course, Cooking Method, Quick & Easy and Low-Calorie). Each category has subcategories, and as you narrow down your browsing, you’ll see a variety of different recipes. As you read the recipe you can automatically add the ingredients to a shopping list with a simple tap. You can also add recipes to a favorites list so they’re easily accessible for later

10 Digital Recipe Sidekick is an interactive Android Application that allows you to use your phone as a interactive recipe reader. DRS comes preloaded with 14 recipes, but you can import more recipes from the DRS Library or from AllRecipes.com (both are accessible within the app). Digital Recipe Sidekick is a free app that will help you build, manage, and share your recipe collection; it will also read recipes to you, hands-free, step-by-step. Using DRS is simple–just select a recipe and press Start Cooking. You then have three control modes to choose from: ‘Speech and buttons’, ‘Claps and buttons’, and ‘Buttons only’. Next, you set the sensitivity of the microphone to High, Medium, or Low.


Sourced from zepy

West Asian crisis: Food prices may remain high

Impact will be more on import-dependent food items, says Economic Survey.

With political turmoil in West Asia intensifying, the government’s pre-Budget Economic Survey warns that food prices in India could go up, in line with rising global prices, even as the overall inflation might moderate in the coming months. The impact would be more on import-dependent food items, like edible oils.

Calling for maintaining an anti-inflationary monetary stance that won’t stymie growth, the Survey said inflation seemed to be driven by demand factors, in spite of improved supplies. This is in contrast with last financial year, when inflation was mostly because of poor monsoon.

Primary food articles in the revised wholesale price index (WPI) touched a historic high of 21.9 per cent in February 2010, before declining to 9.4 per cent in November and again rising to 13.6 per cent in December.

Among food items, sharp rise in prices was observed in onions, fruit, eggs, meat & fish and milk. The rate of food inflation has been in double digits for 76 weeks since June 5, 2009.

However, overall WPI, which peaked at around 11 per cent in April 2010, has been on the decline, which the survey attributes largely to macroeconomic steps taken by the government and the Reserve Bank of India.

The inflation in terms of consumer price index for industrial workers (CPI-IW) remained in double digits from
July 2009 to July 2010, while CPI for agricultural labourers (CPI-AL) and rural labourers (CPI-RL) reached double digits in May 2009 and remained there until July 2010.

CPI-AL and CPI-RL had been higher than CPI-IW because of improvement in purchasing power in rural areas and changing consumption pattern, the Survey said.

The two major contributors to high CPI-IW were food and housing. The rate of food inflation in the CPI-IW rose to 7.98 per cent in December from 5.35 per cent in November.

Sourced from Business Standard

Rise in food prices causing major concerns in Russia

Dmitry Dovlatov, Special to Russia Now 5:07PM GMT 25 Feb 2011

As Russia emerges from the economic crisis it now faces more traditional foes, with higher food prices, and capital inflows creating speculative bubbles

The worst of the crunch may be over, but as the consumer’s basket will tell you, Russia’s economic health faces a further relapse.

In 2010, inflation was 8.8pc, after being in double digits for more than two decades. But the price of the monthly basket of goods used to define the poverty level rose 22pc, to 2,626 rubles (£55).

“The reappearance of inflation could derail Russia’s economic recovery as it hits the Russian consumer’s pocket directly. With oil prices expected to be more or less flat in 2011, it will be the strength of internal consumption that will set the pace for economic growth this year,” said Alexey Moiseev, chief economist at VTB Capital.

“The rise in food prices is the major concern and part of the current global upward trend, but there is relatively little the authorities can do about it.”

Sourced from Telegraph

Shoppers gloomy over looming price rises

Consumer pessimism overfood prices has rocketed, with the vast majority of shoppers bracing themselves for bigger shopping bills and many already switching to the cheapest own-label products.

Over 90% of more than 1,000 shoppers polled by the IGD for the body’s latest monthly ShopperTrack survey said they expect food prices to rise further.

A third of those polled was even more pessimistic, saying their shopping would become “much more expensive”.

Less than one in five were so downbeat in the equivalent poll just four months ago. But a series of headlines over rising commodity prices and shopping bills has sapped confidence in retailers’ ability to keep prices low.
As a result, one in four shoppers is now vowing to buy more of the lowest-priced supermarket own-label products to make ends meet, compared with less than one in five in the October ShopperTrack survey.

“There’s been widespread media coverage of rising commodity prices and the pressures it is placing on the cost of food,” said IGD chief executive Joanne Denney-Finch. “We see the effect of this coming through in our shopper research,”

She added: “This pressure, combined with higher living costs, is causing shoppers to reassess how they spend their money.”

Sourced from The Grocer

Waitrose goes head to head with Ocado

Waitrose and Ocado will compete directly on home deliveries within the M25 for the first time.

Speculation that Waitrose would take on Ocado has swirled since John Lewis's pension trust sold its stake in the online grocer this month. Photograph: David Levene

Waitrose will take on Ocado next month in the battle for affluent customers in the south east as it relaunches its home delivery service with a £10m investment.

Waitrose said an easier-to-navigate website under the Waitrose.com brand will compete directly with Ocado inside the M25 for the first time. The relaunch comes ahead of Morrisons' planned entry into the home delivery business and fresh competition from Marks & Spencer.

Waitrose.com is due to be available from the second week of March and the company will start emailing over 1 million customers on Tuesday. The supermarket, which is owned by the John Lewis partnership, claims that grocery ordering will be easier and quicker, with more delivery slots at peak times such as Fridays and weekends, and delivery drivers offering to carry shopping into the kitchen.

Ocado shares, which have had a good run recently after flopping in the wake of a lacklustre flotation at 180p last summer, are set to plummet on the news on Monday. Ocado's chief executive, Tim Steiner, sold his first big tranche of stock last week – 2m shares for £5.1m – to cash in on the 44% price rise since the float, helped by the retailer's recent move into profitability. He retains a 5% stake.

Ocado shares closed 2.1% higher at 259.3p on Friday. Investors have been cheered by its first quarterly profit, although it remained in the red over 2010 as a whole.

Waitrose's move comes as it rolls out its delivery service in London, a process that will be complete by July. It has a 10-year supply agreement with Ocado, which mainly sells Waitrose products. When the deal was renewed last May, both agreed to drop a clause that barred Waitrose from delivering within the M25 – a key battleground for retailers.

A Waitrose spokeswoman said: "We have been co-existing, or competing to use another word, for a long time. There is room for both. Our business has certainly been flourishing. We're raising the game of our online offer – groceries, flowers, gifts, home and entertainment. It's a very big investment in the entire online business."

Speculation that Waitrose would take on Ocado has swirled since the John Lewis pension trust sold its 10.4% stake in the internet grocer.

Waitrose says it will continue to be the only major online grocer offering year-round free delivery for all orders over £50. In addition to popular staples, such as a full range of Essential Waitrose items, and well known branded products – 1,000 of which are price matched with Tesco – customers will be able to navigate their way around virtual cheese, fish, meat and delicatessen counters.

There will also be "personal touch" features to replicate the service that customers get in a Waitrose branch.
They can make requests to the worker responsible for picking their shopping and opt for specific numbers of items rather than a standard pack size – for example, a single onion needed for a recipe – as well as making requests for, say, green bananas or extra-thick slices of ham.

Waitrose, which has 244 shops in the UK, started offering home delivery in some branches in 2000.
Mark Price, Waitrose's managing director, said: "This investment in our online platform will dramatically enhance the customer experience so that shoppers receive the unrivalled standards of service and the personal touch they associate with our branches. With more investment planned, this new platform accelerates our progress as a truly multichannel retailer."

The move comes at a time of growing competition in the online grocery market. Supermarket group Morrisons harbours ambitions to launch its own internet delivery service, amid talk that it could be interested in Ocado.

M&S's new chief executive Marc Bolland, recently poached Laura Wade-Gery, Tesco's e-commerce supremo, to lead its online and telephone sales drive. His goal is to at least double sales from the website, by phone and via the collect-from-the-store facility – to £800m-£1bn by 2014.

Sourced from The Guardian

Jamie Oliver helps Sainsbury's win Christmas battle with rivals

Analysts say chef, snow, job cuts and impending VAT increase behind 10.1% rise in revenue for supermarket during December

The growing popularity of Jamie Oliver, who fronts Sainsbury's ad campaigns, is seen as a factor in the retailer's performance. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Sainsbury's won the traditional Christmas battle among Britain's big-four supermarkets as cash-strapped consumers went upmarket in search of some much-needed yuletide cheer.

The victory came against a December backdrop of two halves. Following three weeks of lacklustre sales, the supermarkets collectively revelled in a 16% increase in revenues in the week to Christmas Day, taking a record £3.36bn, according to initial estimates from the Nielsen research group.

In addition to a boost from Jamie Oliver, the chef who fronts its ad campaigns, Sainsbury's benefited as consumers reacted to a cocktail of woes in December, pushing its sales up by a far greater proportion than

its supermarket rivals – Tesco, Morrisons and Asda.

"As Christmas approached consumers had finally had enough. We were told throughout 2010 about job cuts, then it was the impending VAT increase, then it snowed through much of December. And so we decided we might just treat ourselves," said Jonathan Pritchard, an analyst at the City firm Oriel Securities.

Shoppers still regard Sainsbury's as having the best quality produce of the big four supermarkets, analysts say. But the more expensive Waitrose and Marks & Spencer are seen as being top of the tree in terms of quality in consumers' eyes.

Analysts also said that the growing popularity of Oliver – whose latest book, 30-Minute Meals, became the fastest-selling non-fiction title of all time when it was published in the autumn – may have played a part in the success of Sainsbury's over the festive period.

"The weather gave us a white Christmas but we had an orange Christmas where supermarkets were concerned," said Mike Watkins, senior manager of retail services at Nielsen, referring to Sainsbury's orange livery.

Watkins added that the supermarket chain outperformed its rivals, in part, because of an increase in retail space and a greater reliance on non-food items.

In the four weeks to December 25 Sainsbury's reported a 10.1% increase in sales, compared with the same period in 2009, while Tesco and Morrisons both experienced a 6.9% rise and Asda a 5.8% one.
Sainsbury's sales increase lifted its share of the supermarket industry from 14.9% to 15.4% in the 12 weeks to Christmas Day. Over the same period Tesco, the market leader, had a 27.8% share, Asda had 15.8% and Morrisons had 10.8%, according to initial estimates by Nielsen.

The robust performance of the big four supermarkets over December will boost confidence in Britain's retail sector after chains such as Mothercare, Next, HMV, Clinton Cards and celebrity jeweller Theo Fennell blamed wintry weather for disappointing trading figures.

HMV's share's fell by more than 20% earlier this week after the high street music retailer announced a sharp drop in sales and plans to close 60 of almost 300 stores in the UK and Ireland

Sourced from the Guardian

Asda warns of frail consumer confidence as shoppers spend less

• Asda pledges to keep its prices 10% lower than rival chains
• Asda reported 2.6% increase in fourth quarter like-for-like-sales

Asda's Income tracker for January showed families were £9 a week worse off than in the same month a year ago. Photograph Linda Nylind

Asda has sounded the alarm about fragile consumer confidence, warning that "anxious" shoppers were behaving as though the country was heading back into recession – running down their cupboard stocks and buying scratch cards in the hope a winning ticket might provide an "escape".

Britain's second largest supermarket said one in three shoppers was buying exactly £30, £40 or £50 worth of petrol. That compares with one in five before the recession and is seen to be evidence that shoppers are sticking to strict budgets.

Asda chief executive Andy Clarke said sentiment had deteriorated since the turn of the year as higher taxes, job losses and interest rate rises on the horizon left little room for optimism: "I don't expect consumer confidence to increase given the challenges faced by the British public in the coming months. Job security is at the front of consumers minds."

Despite the gloomy outlook Clarke was reporting a resurgence at the Wal-Mart owned supermarket, which after a poor first half won back customers with the launch of a "price guarantee" which it has extended to a pledge that its groceries will be at least 10% cheaper than rivals with shoppers able to check online.

He described the guarantee – which has prompted a war of words with Tesco – as a "game changer", with 800,000 shoppers logging on since January. Asda also said sales had benefited from the £100m relaunch of its main own-label range. When Clarke took over last May he said Asda's food was not as good as that of its rivals.

In the final quarter like-for-like sales at Asda were up 2.6%– its best quarterly performance of 2010. That improvement put it behind only Sainsbury's – with underlying growth of 2.8% – in the Christmas pecking order.

Tesco reported a small fall in underlying sales over Christmas, while Morrisons delivered a 1% rise.

"We outperformed the market and returned to growth," said Clarke. He added that profits had grown faster than sales in 2010 but declined to give details. Industry data from Kantar Worldpanel showed Sainsbury's edge ahead of Asda to become the market number two in December but Clarke said that was a "blip": "All of our forecasts suggest we will regain that position in the next set of data."

Sainsbury's showing was boosted by a spurt of supermarket openings late last year while Asda is hoping to benefit from last year's deal to buy discount chain Netto, though it is yet to receive the green light from the Office of Fair Trading.

Clarke's plans for Asda include making more of its ties with Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer. He said joint buying saved it $70m (£43m) during the year, a sum he said highlighted the "importance of leveraging Wal-Mart to support the British consumer". Asda will start selling upmarket homewares brand "Elegant Living" in the spring which it claims will be 30% cheaper than the high street. The same products are sold under the Canopy banner in US stores.

The Asda Income tracker for January found that families were £9 a week worse off than the same month a year ago. The retailer said the fall was significant as it marked a "decline on a decline" with the index, which is compiled by independent economists, showing 13 consecutive months of declining spending power in UK households. There is evidence from elsewhere in the sector that shoppers are feeling the pinch with recent grocery market data showing a big swing back to discounters Aldi and Lidl while high street barometer John Lewis has seen sales slow since the start of the year.

Asda finance director Rob McWilliam also pointed to other warning signs including scratch card sales which are up 6% in the last year and at a level last seen in the autumn of 2008 when Lehman Brothers was collapsing. "Scratch card sales increase when people are anxious and looking for an escape," he said. "It is back in the direction of travel it was two years ago so consumers out there are worried." He added that shoppers were doing less bulk buying of cupboard fillers such as cleaning products to "free up cash".

10 Food Facts

Sourced from Todayfoundout.com

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