Food poverty campaigner Jack Monroe has found several everyday food items to have dramatically lowered in price in her local supermarket.
The campaigner, who herself used to use food banks, took a trip to her nearest Asda store in Southend-On-Sea.
While there, she found several basic items had plummeted in price, from pasta to peanut butter.
Posting about her discoveries on Twitter, the campaigner was full of praise for Asda — saying they had performed an ‘immediate’ pricing ‘turnaround’.
“I was very quick to vilify Asda for what I saw as a change of direction for their company, and a watering down of their commitment to an entire group of their customers,” Ms Monroe said. “And to their credit, they read it all, and a LOT of your comments too, reached out, and said they’d do better.
“The turnaround for this has been almost immediate - the speed at which they responded, not just with words, but with exactly what they said they would do - has been absolutely remarkable.
“The impact that this will have on millions of people, is impossible to overstate. And of all of the supermarkets that reached out to me in the last weeks, Asda have been the only ones to actually act on our conversations and make things right.”
In her trip, Jack said she had seen a 500g penne pasta packet return to its 29p price, after a 141 price increase last month.
The same trend could be found in a 1kg bag of rice, she added, after it had jumped from 45p to £1.
Now, it is back to the 45p cost.
Baked beans have also dropped by 10p, back down to 22 pence — with canned spaghetti going to 13p from 35p. Curry sauce’s 196 percent rise to 89p has also been reversed.
Fresh food was also included in the changes, with apples being reduced by 17p in price to 72p.
Jack called her day the ‘happiest shopping experience in a decade’.
She continued: “Today, I could put extra treats in my shopping basket for SB. Today, I managed to get so much in my £20 basket that I was clutching rice and oats and muesli to my bosom as I wrestled to the checkout. Today is the happiest shopping experience in over a decade.
“I’ve cried in supermarkets plenty in the last 10 years. Putting back jam that had crept up by sixpence, meaning SB and I faced a week of bone dry toast. Trying to work out what to put back, what to do without, out of a tenner's worth of groceries that weren’t enough to start with.
“I’ve cried tears of humiliation when a shelf edge label turned out to be advertising an expired promotion, tipping my shopping over what I could afford from the six pounds or so in change - the only money I had in the world - in my hand.
“And today I cried, quietly, to myself, in Asda, as the enormity of all of the last few weeks finally sank in amongst all the white labels in my shopping basket.”
