Ordinary Gweilo

Buying “expat” food in Hong Kong (and probably most other places in Asia) is very hit and miss.  Sales volumes are usually really low, which makes it difficult for the retailers to know how many to order.  Prices are high, because of the combination of low volumes and the cost of air freight. 

I always feel slightly conflicted when these products are reduced (close to the sell-by date), because that may well mean that they won’t reorder it. 

Except that it can take a while – one supermarket used to stock French goats cheese and I’d estimate that less than 10% was sold at full price, and a lot was bought by me at a big discount (sell-by dates are just a guideline it’ll probably be fine a week or two later).  Yet they kept re-stocking it – though they have finally stopped now.

Popular(ish) products also randomly disappear.  So it’s possible that (1) their algorithm is broken, or (2) it’s just someone with a spreadsheet who happened to notice (or not).

Sometimes the product is available at another branch of the supermarket or just randomly re-appears, at which point I am strongly tempted to buy it in an effort to persuade them to keep stocking it.  Which is probably delusional given the randomness noted above.

For example, I was bemused by the occasional appearance of Waitrose sausages in the Taste supermarket in Kowloon Tong.  Someone clearly hadn’t worked out that by the time they get off the plane and in to the store it is just a few days before the sell-by date, and so they have to reduce the price almost immediately.  They seem to have figured that and I haven’t seen them recently.

Incidentally, M&S now freeze things like sausages to have better control over sell-by dates.

Many years ago there was a blog run by two expatriate gentlemen in Hong Kong (Mr Tall and Mr Balding).  Amazingly, it seems to have survived (in archived form), including this article on how much food costs in Hong Kong.  It’s obviously out-of-date, but the comparison between a normal supermarket and the high-end stuff is really astonishing.  

Off-the-shelf food items
	Mid-budget	High-budget
White rice, 1 kg	HK$7.60 Kam Heung (Thai)	HK$49 Organic (USA)
Spaghetti, 500g	HK$10.80 Vetta (Italy)	HK$68.50 Italian organic
Flour, white 1 kg	HK$18.20 Betty Crocker (USA)	HK$23.50 Marriage’s organic (UK)
Cheese, imported 250g	HK$34.50 Mainland (NZ) cheddar	HK$70.00 Farmhouse cheddar (UK)

And yet…whilst I’m sure that there are highly-paid foreigners who go crazy buying the really expensive stuff (albeit probably fewer now than in 2007), there’s no need for that.  A little bit of shopping around pays dividends:  ParknShop has good quality imported products, albeit scattered somewhat randomly across its various different supermarkets (Great, Taste, Fusion, International, etc.) and Dairy Farm have “Market Place” (previously Jason’s Market) alongside the regular Wellcome stores.  Or there’s HKTVmall.   

Taking the list above (2007 prices remember), I am quite happy with organic pasta from the French supermarket Casino that is available in PnS for around HK$20. 

And yes, you could go to CitySuper and pay a small fortune for some organic cheddar or you could find Waitrose own-brand in Great (but not in Taste recently) or try M&S (and they don’t freeze the cheese).  

The new(ish) Market Place in The Wai (next to Tai Wai station) is huge and very confusing, with one small display of cheeses in a prominent position and then another in a different section with a better choice.  I suppose they were offered this over-large unit because the MTR want their new shopping mall to look good, but 

Market Place also has an interesting policy on changing prices on its 200gm blocks of cheese under the Meadows brand: these cycle round from 35p to 40p to 45p quite predictably.  By Hong Kong standards, 35p for 200g is good value, even 45p is acceptable, but of course I’m going to wait for the price drop.

You do have to shop around, because some supermarkets will charge crazy prices for some products and sensible prices for others.  And even CitySuper, which has plenty of crazy prices, does also have some products at reasonable prices (e.g. its own brand organic or free-range eggs from Spain).