r/GreenAndPleasant

Excuse my ramblings, but does anyone else find the ‘save our Christian nation’ shit from the right just very..... unbecoming? I know I’m preaching to the choir, but it just reeks of yank. Christianity in England has always been the domain of Afro-Caribbean, immigrants from more religious countries or Irish grannies. Maybe some older Anglicans in rural areas.

So it was a bit jarring seeing all the crusader garb and piles of crosses at all these right-wing demonstrations. Like, are these dickheads getting up early on a Sunday for church service, and if so, which one? Some woke Anglican church? Or those Afro-Caribbean churches with a whole sentence in the title? This shit has always existed in the UK, but it was all Ulster-Unionism. The rest of has a bang of America off it, even Russell Brand’s recent turn.

Ten years ago these Barry’s would have a giggle at Mrs. Browns Boys or enjoy a Christmas panto, now they’re screaming about trans-indoctrination.

I think the most visible of these guys is UKIP leader Nick Tenconi, who has US brain-rot come to UK written all over him.

I’m Irish and in my mid 30s, and of course I went through a bit of a edge-lord atheist phase because of the Catholic Church’s history of sexual abuse was starting to get more exposure while I was in my late teens early 20s. So my generally socially liberal circles were a bit more non-religious, and when people did say they were catholic they’d be a little bit cagey about it. Early 2010s, so there was an air of ‘the old Catholic Ireland is over, welcome to progress’. Mass was for older people that we’d kind of take the piss out of.

I spent a lot of time in England and what I loved about it was just how little religion played a role in people’s lives, or at least the white English people I spent most of my time with. I felt a little embarrassed by how puritanical and uncool Ireland could be compared to England.

I'm not a journalist. I'm a reverse engineer. My day job is pulling apart malware apps that spy on their users, skim data they didn't consent to share, or run structures designed to extract value while looking like they're providing a service.

When I read the Guardian piece on supermarket price caps this morning, I did what I always do. I ignored the argument and followed the numbers.

The numbers are worse than the argument.

What cheddar costs

Wholesale mild cheddar in the UK right now is £2,980 per tonne. That's the AHDB published spot price for April 2026. Demand is weak. Milk volumes are at record highs. There is, in their words, "plenty of cheese available" and "little urgency to buy."

£2,980 per tonne is £2.98 per kilo.

Now go to Tesco.

Tesco Medium Cheddar 400g: £3.25. That's £8.12 per kilo. Tesco Mature Cheddar 400g: £3.25. That's £8.12 per kilo. Tesco Extra Mature Cheddar 400g: £3.25. That's £8.12 per kilo. Cathedral City Mature 350g: £4.20 full price. That's £12.00 per kilo. Cathedral City Extra Mature 350g: £3.50. That's £10.00 per kilo. Pilgrims Choice Mature 350g: £4.20 full price. That's £12.00 per kilo. Tesco Finest Vintage Cheddar 300g: £4.10. That's £13.67 per kilo. Tesco Mature Grated 250g: £2.55. That's £10.20 per kilo. Tesco Mature 220g: £2.50. That's £11.36 per kilo.

The cheapest cheddar on Tesco's website is £5.54 per kilo for a 900g block of Creamfields Mild. The most expensive is £13.67 per kilo for the Finest range.

The wholesale price is £2.98 per kilo.

I want to be honest about the gap. The £2.98 is bulk mild cheddar at the dairy gate. Between that number and the retail shelf there are real costs: maturation (months for mature, over a year for extra mature, with storage, humidity control, and capital tied up), packaging, branding, distribution, refrigerated logistics, store labour, energy, waste, and shrinkage. Nobody disputes these are real. A branded mature cheddar at retail has genuinely higher costs than a tonne of bulk mild on a spot market.

But those costs are not a mystery. They are quantifiable. And when you look at the wholesale arm of the same company that runs the retail shelf, you can see roughly where the floor is.

What Booker charges

Booker is Tesco's wholesale arm. Same parent company. Tesco bought Booker in 2018 for £3.7 billion. Booker sells to restaurants, cafes, corner shops, caterers.

Chef's Essentials Mature Cheddar 5kg: £32.25. That's £6.45 per kilo. Chef's Essentials Mild Cheddar 5kg: £31.75. That's £6.35 per kilo. Chef's Larder Taw Valley Mature 5kg: £36.50. That's £7.30 per kilo. Chef's Larder Taw Valley Extra Mature 1kg: £7.99 per kilo. Chef's Essentials Mature Grated 2kg: £11.99. That's £6.00 per kilo. Cathedral City Mature 200g (case of 6): £13.99. That's £11.66 per kilo.

Booker sells mature cheddar to caterers for £6.00 to £7.30 per kilo. That price already includes maturation, processing, grating or blocking, packaging, wholesale margin, and delivery. It is not the dairy gate price. It is a finished product with real costs baked in, sold at a profit by a company that needs to make money.

On the Booker listing, next to every branded product, there's a figure called POR: the retailer's gross profit as a percentage of the selling price when sold at the recommended retail price.

Cathedral City Mature 200g: 29.1% POR. Cathedral City Extra Mature 200g: 29.1% POR. Tyrrells Cheddar & Chive Crisps 40g: 72.6% POR. Pipers Cheddar & Onion Crisps 40g: 61.9% POR. McCoy's Cheddar & Onion Crisps 65g: 30.3% POR.

The POR on Cathedral City means that when a corner shop sells it at £3.29 RRP, roughly 29p of every pound is gross margin. That's the margin at the recommended price. When Tesco sells the same product at £4.20 or £12.00 per kilo, the margin is wider.

The chain

Wholesale cheddar: £2.98/kg. Booker catering cheddar (same parent company, finished product): £6.00 to £7.30/kg. Tesco own brand retail: £8.12/kg. Tesco branded retail: £10.00 to £13.67/kg.

The honest comparison is not £2.98 to £12. The honest comparison is Booker's finished catering cheddar at £6.00 to £7.30 versus Tesco's retail shelf at £8.12 to £13.67. Same parent company. Same supply chain. Same cheese, in many cases literally the same cheese from the same dairy.

The difference is who's buying it. A restaurant owner pays £6.45/kg. A family pays £8.12 to £12.00/kg. The family is buying less, in a smaller package, from a fancier shelf. But the product inside the packaging is the same cheddar.

The retail premium on a 400g block versus a 5kg catering block is 25% to 90%. Some of that is real: packaging cost per gram is higher on small packs, retail shelf space is expensive, refrigerated display cabinets use energy, staff stack and rotate stock, Clubcard infrastructure costs money, and waste on short-dated dairy products is a genuine operational cost. These are not trivial. But the question remains: how much of the gap between £6.45 and £12.00 is operational cost, and how much is margin?

Tesco does not publish category-level margins. No UK supermarket does. Company-wide, Tesco's gross margin is 7.6% and its operating margin is roughly 4%. Critics will immediately point to this: "they only make 4p on every pound, where's the extraction?" But enterprise-level averages obscure category-level behaviour. A supermarket can sell milk and bread at near cost (or below, as loss leaders to drive footfall) while running 30% to 40% gross margins on cheese, snacks, and ready meals. The 4% net is an average across thousands of product lines. It does not tell you what is happening on the cheddar shelf specifically. The POR data from Booker, which is not intended for public consumption, is the closest we get to product-level margin visibility. And at 29% on Cathedral City before Tesco's own markup, it is not 4%.

What the government is actually arguing about

The Guardian piece says the government asked supermarkets to voluntarily freeze prices on about 20 essential items. Bread, milk, cheese, eggs, rice, chicken.

One supermarket executive called it "completely mad."

The British Retail Consortium said the UK has "the most affordable grocery prices in western Europe" and accused the government of proposing "1970s-style price controls."

Meanwhile: wholesale cheddar is £2.98/kg and retail cheddar is £8 to £14/kg. Milk volumes are at record highs. There is plenty of cheese. Demand is weak. The wholesale price fell 3% last month.

The government is not proposing price controls. The government is noticing that the gap between what food costs and what food is sold for has become structurally wide, and asking if maybe the people selling it could stop widening it.

The supermarkets' response is: that's mad.

What the supermarkets actually said

"This is an unnecessary, unwanted and unjustified intervention in the market." Unnecessary for whom? Not for the person paying £12/kg for something that the same company sells to caterers at £6.45/kg.

"The UK has the most affordable grocery prices in western Europe." This is Helen Dickinson of the British Retail Consortium. The claim is based on Eurostat price level indices comparing a standardised food basket across European countries, with the EU average set at 100. The UK scored below average before Brexit. After 2020, no official Eurostat data exists for the UK because we left the programme. The post-Brexit estimates come from the IGD, an industry research body funded by the food and grocery sector, using their own synthesised methodology. The IGD is not Eurostat. Their numbers are not peer reviewed. The BRC is citing industry-funded research to defend industry pricing.

Even setting that aside: the EU average includes Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland, where median wages are a fraction of the UK's. Being below that average means nothing for a Western European economy. And the aggregate basket hides category differences. Eurostat's own 2024 data shows dairy prices vary sharply by country. The UK's position on dairy specifically is not published post-Brexit. The BRC is defending cheddar pricing with a basket average that doesn't measure cheddar.

Anyone who has bought cheese in a French supermarket, or wine, or bread, knows the claim doesn't survive contact with a receipt. The comparison ignores what people earn after housing costs, what they get in social provision, and what specific products actually cost in specific shops. It is a lobbying line, not an analysis.

"Rather than introduce 1970s style price controls and trying to force retailers to sell goods at a loss." Nobody proposed selling at a loss. Booker sells finished mature cheddar at £6.45/kg and makes money doing it. Tesco sells equivalent product at £8.12 to £12.00/kg. Selling at "a loss" would require prices to fall below roughly £6 to £7/kg. Nobody is asking for that. They're asking whether £12 is necessary.

"The cost of doing something like this is huge." The cost of doing what? Selling cheese closer to the price your own wholesale arm already sells it? The cost of that is making less money. That's the cost. That's the whole cost.

What the SNP proposed

Scotland's government pledged to fix prices on 20 to 50 essential items. Bread, milk, cheese, eggs, rice, chicken. The items people need to not die.

Retailers immediately called it a "potty gimmick."

Whether the SNP did the maths or not, what they noticed is real: the gap between commodity prices and retail prices on essential foods has become a wealth transfer mechanism. Not because anyone is breaking the law. Because the structure allows it. Commodity prices fall, retail prices don't, and the gap becomes operating profit.

The cost of living crisis is a margin crisis

The phrase "cost of living crisis" implies that things cost more. That prices are high because inputs are expensive. That everyone in the chain is suffering.

The wholesale cheddar price is £2.98/kg. It fell 3% last month. Milk volumes are at record highs. There is no supply crisis. There is no input crisis.

There is a margin crisis. The cost of raw materials went up in 2022 and 2023. Retail prices went up to match. Then the cost of raw materials came back down. Retail prices did not come back down. The gap became margin. The margin became profit. The profit became "the most affordable grocery prices in western Europe."

Tesco's revenue for FY 2025/26 was £73.7 billion. Up 5.4%. Their operating profit guidance is £3.0 to £3.3 billion. Their CEO said the company is "committed to doing whatever we can to help keep down the cost of the weekly shop."

The weekly shop includes cheddar at £8 to £14 per kilo when finished catering cheddar from their own wholesale arm sells for £6 to £7.

That is not keeping costs down. That is keeping margins up.

What's left

Strip away the politics, the Guardian framing, the SNP posturing, the BRC lobbying. What's left?

One comparison: £6 to £7/kg at Booker. £8 to £14/kg at Tesco. Same parent company. Same supply chain.

That gap, replicated across thousands of essential products, is a meaningful component of the cost of living crisis. Not the whole crisis. But a clean, visible, measurable piece of it. Sitting on every shelf in every Tesco in the country. Not publicly audited at the product level. Not transparent to the consumer paying it.

The government is not mad for noticing. The supermarkets are not mad for resisting. The supermarkets are doing what the structure incentivises them to do: capture the margin between falling input costs and sticky retail prices, and call it efficiency.

The structure is legal. The numbers are public. The mechanism is standard.

The question is whether it's acceptable.

£2.98.

AHDB. UK wholesale prices. Published monthly. Free to read.

Then go to Tesco and check the shelf.