M&S, please stop playing with your food

Spectator

a day ago

Maybe it was when M&S began selling chicken katsu sando-flavoured crisps, or launched its Plant Kitchen range with its inedible alternative to chicken, or began slathering 'green goddess sauce' on already clammy ready salads. Or maybe it was the thousandth time I traipsed, freezing, through the tightly packed rat run of a station M&S Food – there are no fewer than three in King's Cross – in search of something that I never found. Namely: something nourishing and delicious, rather than a freezing piece of over-marketed randomness.
At any rate, many of us in the more high-falutin' bits of the middle class fell out of love with what was once the high-water mark of grocery. M&S Food now feels less like an emporium or supermarket or even a nice sandwich shop, and more like a cramped maze round the most unwholesome end of postmodern consumerism. It is certainly a supermarket in a great hurry. M&S is relentless. It never rests. Waitrose quietly introduces staples from Ottolenghi's cookbooks and online health trends – thanks to the latter, avocado oil, pistachios and spicy Korean gochujang sauce are all frequently sold out.
But there is nothing quiet about M&S's approach to keeping up with the influencers. Hence its weirdest offering yet. M&S is now selling a strawberries and cream sandwich inspired, completely incomprehensibly, next to the sweet sandos of Japan. Sweet sandos, for those who haven't been subjected to such things, are fruit sandwiches, formerly sold only in luxury fruit shops in Japan, but now sold across the whole country. Why? Why?
Why would a British consumer accustomed to the cherished traditional summery treat of strawberries and – on its own, or in jam form on scones – want to grab a quick strawberry sando from M&S and guzzle it on the packed train home? It's beyond weird. After all, this is not – in fact – Japan. For one thing our trains are much worse. For another, we view processed bread as something of a downgrade for fine or fresh ingredients. We also see sandwiches as savoury, lunchtime or teatime food.
It is true that in the whackier corners of food TikTok, fruit sandwiches make some viral appearances. I've seen strange things with watermelon (one vegan account I follow recently encouraged viewers to cook it in rectangular slabs as if it were salmon), and a fair few East Asian-inspired mango sandwiches. But such content is mostly viewed – by non-East Asians at any rate – with fascination or horror, as opposed to the more usual resolve to recreate the recipe at home.
M&S runs the risk of becoming a novelty shop
M&S runs the risk of becoming a novelty shop. Earlier this year it launched chocolates shaped as emojis, including the suggestive aubergine. Its Christmas ranges cause overwhelming bemusement; all British supermarkets go berserk at holidays, but M&S becomes downright deranged. This past Christmas saw chocolate and cinnamon tortilla rolls, white mulled wine and turkey feast dip. It's as if a room full of drunk and high teenagers were left in charge of a retail algorithm.
M&S has leaned so far into trends that its website actually has a Top Ten Food Trends list for 2025, which predicts (in the way that anyone plugged into social media may predict) mushroom everything (a health trend, especially lion's mane), pistachio everything (courtesy of the vulgar Dubai chocolate obsession – a mix of pistachio cream, kataifi fried dough and chocolate) and hot honey cottage cheese. M&S boasts explicitly about how it has mastered TikTok – for instance, having created a viral cookies trend in 2024: customers 'couldn't get enough of' its 'hazelnut crème'.
This may garner the chain some extra clicks online. But for the people – the boring old middle-aged, middle-class people who actually need food, like cheese, meat, bread, veg and fruit – it's becoming harder to shop at M&S. It's a shame, because the basics there are really rather good.
Indeed, amid the exhausting experimentalism, there are still a few sane items left at M&S. If train station outlets are mostly snacks, various flimsy plastic containers of sandwiches and picnic-style items, the mid-sized ones – of which there is one near me – are aisles dominated by ready meals. The endless variations on coq au vin, chicken, steak and chips are probably all quite nice, and very sane, but a little depressing. Is this really the best the British middle class can do?