When you think of M&S food, there’s a chance that high-end ready meals, posh wine and delicious Percy Pigs are what spring to mind. But would you do your weekly shop there if you could buy it online and get it delivered to your door?
The supermarket has signed a deal with Ocado that will see it sell food online next year when Ocado’s contract with Waitrose comes to an end. The finer details – including minimum spend for delivery and which M&S stock will be available on site – are yet to be released.
Currently shoppers need to spend a minimum of £40 on Ocado for delivery, while the average M&S shopper spends £13 in store. But the companies have said the deal will offer customers the ability to do a full shop online.
M&S is definitely at the higher price-point end of high street supermarkets. But how does the cost of a weekly shop compare to one at Waitrose? We did a spot of shopping to find out.
What's In Our Shopping Basket? 🍊🥔🍗
There’s quite an array of luxury-looking foods in M&S, but also lots of basics. On our list was: bread, kitchen roll and loo roll (four pack), washing powder, shampoo, dairy (milk, butter, eggs, yoghurt, cheese) pasta and pasta sauce, fruit (satsumas, apples and raspberries for a treat), salad (leaves, cucumber, avocado and tomatoes), veg (potatoes, onions and broccoli), muesli, coffee, blackcurrant squash, crisps, canned tuna, fresh chicken and mince – and the most important item, a packet of Percy Pigs. We didn’t go crazy with the pricey stuff either, opting for a range of basic and mid-range items.
Lots of stuff is costed fairly reasonably. A six-pack of round salad tomatoes cost 70p; a whole cucumber, 60p; a pack of free range eggs, 85p; and a pack of bananas cost £1.
Some items get a little more expensive, with a pack of wafer thin ham costing £3 and 120g of Italian style salad leaves, £2.10 (for comparison, the equivalent costs £1 in Tesco); a 650g pack of satsumas costing £2.60, (a 600g pack in Tesco costs £1.35); and 100g of own label Gold Coffee, £3.20 (Tesco’s equivalent is £1.89).
As for toiletries, a 500ml bottle of Head & Shoulders 2-in-1 will set you back £4.75 in M&S and Sure invisible deodorant costs £2.90 – the same two products at Sainsbury’s cost less, at £4.50 and £1.50 respectively.
According to The Money Advice Service, the average UK household spends £57 a week on food, with families in the South East and Northern Ireland spend the most on a food shop at £63 a week. So how would our M&S basket fare?
The shop at M&S comes to £67.58, so no problem in reaching Ocado’s current minimum £40 spend for delivery. But how does this compare to Ocado’s current retail partner Waitrose? An equivalent shop – minus the Percy Pigs (£1.75) –costs around £74.28 at Waitrose, by HuffPost UK’s calculations. Slightly pricier.
There are caveats. Own line ranges and pack sizes differ between supermarket chains. For example, the M&S store we visited only had a pack of three tuna cans, whereas at Waitrose the minimum pack size we found was four.
And if you’re a Waitrose fan, the good news is when it’s Ocado partnership ends next year you can still buy goods online via the Waitrose website.