What the Tesco Birthday Cake Sandwich says about food innovation

Supermarkets have spent the last 50 years giving us ever more delicious and exotic food from around the world, but has it run out of new ideas?

Here’s a statistic that I often trot out. The year after food rationing ended, Sainsbury’s – at the time the most sophisticated of all the grocery chains – sold a total of 700 products. It, along with Tesco, Asda and the rest, now sells well in excess of 30,000. In the last 70 years, but particularly since the 1980s, supermarkets have given us an unparalleled choice of goods.

In 1953, Sainsbury’s (I keep referring to this chain, because they have a wonderful archive) sold the following types of coffee: Sainsbury’s Pure, Sainsbury’s French and Sainsbury’s Berries. It also sold four different types of coffee ‘essence’ the term it used for both coffee granules and a liquid coffee: Nescafe, Ricory, Lyons’ Bev and Camp. Including all the different sizes of tins and bottles, there were a total of 12 coffees on offer. Now? They sell at least 300. I stopped counting after that.

Amusingly, back then it sold just two types of herbs – dried, of course. One was Sainsbury’s mixed herbs, the other was “sagion stuffing”, a sage-based rival to Paxo made by a company called Stokes & Dalton. Now it sells 261 different dried herbs and spices, plus 37 fresh ones. Tahini, Makrut lime leaves, fajita seasoning, saffron, ancho chilli flakes – these were all unthinkably exotic to our grandparents, not something you could pick up alongside a pint of milk and loaf of bread.

The success of the British supermarket has been partly down to sourcing a fantastic array of different goods from around the world, packaging them enticingly, and offering them at cheap prices. You can argue that supermarkets have aided obesity, that they have caused high streets butchers, bakers, greengrocers and fishmongers to go out of business, that they are partly responsible for the rise of the car and the decline of family meal times. All of these have an element of truth to them, but what is also true is that over the last 50 years they have opened British consumers’ eyes and stomachs to an incredible array of goods, dishes and cuisines.

They have done this in conjunction with food manufacturers, which have worked glove in hand with the supermarkets to come up with new formats — be it whipped feta; protein pitta breads; herbs sold growing in a pot; gruyere and poppy seed cheese straws; Korean seaweed snacks; organic pears, peas and broccoli baby food puree in a pouch; and Cathedral City extra mature vegan cheddar. Are all of these healthy? No. Is the packaging good for the planet? No. But they are all innovative and they all answer a consumer need, be it price, convenience, a nutritional short cut, or taste.

Which brings us on to this week’s latest food innovation, care of the UK’s biggest supermarket: Tesco. It is the Birthday Cake Sandwich, costing £3 or available as a “main” in the £4 Tesco meal deal. It follows hot on the heels of M&S’s strawberry “sando”, a nod to a Japanese tradition of eating fruit-based sandwiches on pappy white bread. The Tesco one is nodding towards, well, TikTok. I tried it so you don’t have to. Video below.

It was, in fact, far less terrible than I feared, considering the 515cals and 31.5g of sugar in the sarnie (nearly matching the 35g in a can of Coca-Cola). The filling was quite a light, lemony cream cheese, a layer of not great strawberry jam and some sprinkles. The bread was a slightly sweetened brioche-style bread, which had a better texture and taste than the cheapo sliced white that dominated my childhood.

But what consumer need was it answering? It wasn’t convenience, it wasn’t nutrition, it wasn’t price, and it wasn’t taste. It wasn’t introducing us Brits to a curious, exotic cuisine from the other side of the world. No, the reason it had been developed was something that makes me fear for the long, noble tradition of food innovation in UK supermarkets. And it is this: social media virality. Yes, I played straight into Tesco’s hands by going out and buying (with my own money!) two sandwiches and immediately getting my 13-year-old to film me so I could post about it on social media. I realise I am the mug here.

I’ve written about supermarket food trends quite a bit and interviewed, on many occasions, food trend analysts (a great job!) and product developers (an even better one; imagine coming up with the egg protein pot or white mulled wine!) and traditionally they sourced their ideas by scouring restaurant menus, reading cookbooks, travelling the world and eating at food markets and hamburger trucks. Then they would negotiate with food manufacturers about how to replicate different dishes and cuisines on a cheap budget and with, ideally, a decent shelflife. Yes, they now scour Instagram and TikTok for dishes and recipes more than cookbooks, but the principle is the same: let’s take something delicious, something fashionable, something desirable and make a version robust enough to survive the journey from the factory to the warehouse, to the supermarket shelf.

But the Tesco Birthday Cake Sandwich suggests the focus of innovation has shifted away from creating something desirable, something convenient, something cheap, tasty or nutritious to creating something whose sole purpose is to go viral. And nothing else.

Does this matter? The key thing to remember with supermarket food is that there is limited shelf space. For every new product that gets stocked, every protein drink and fancy brioche bun, something has to be axed. So, the Birthday Cake Sandwich has elbowed out some other possibly far more delicious but far less TikTok-friendly wrap or sarnie. By developing limited edition products (“Get it while you can” says the packaging), designed to be snapped up by influencers and foolish journalists, supermarkets are diverting a small amount of money and skill from genuinely great innovation.