Outraged Sydney butcher says Coles stole his idea
Coles sparked much excitement (and a few “ewws” for some!) when they announced the launch of their lamb, cheese and Vegemite sausages, but one man isn’t happy about the product one bit.
Joe Bolton from Tender Gourmet Butchery at Bondi Junction’s Eastgate Shopping Centre has been selling beef, cheese and Vegemite sausages for years and says the supermarket giant took his popular product and are now reaping the rewards.
“They’re just stealing someone else’s idea and making it a little bit different,” he told Yahoo Be, referring to Coles’ snags swapping the beef for lamb.
“They do a fantastic job, but they can’t do what we do,” Bolton said. “[Their sausages are] mass-produced and they don’t [use] natural skins on their sausages. They’re using a collagen product, it’s a beef product make of rendered fat.
“I’d go on the record to say competition is good, but the meat that goes into our sausages is completely different. You can’t even compare. We use muscle, we don’t put in whole carcass.”
However, Coles has denied this claim, saying its snags are made with “natural casing” and not rendered fat, nor does it use the “whole carcass”.
“We use the same cuts of meat that butchers do,” the food giant explained, adding that its sausages were made from “our own recipe created with the team at Vegemite”.
Despite this, Bolton’s store is located opposite a Coles store and says the traffic is a huge benefit for his business.
“It’s a catch-22,” he says. “Yes, they undercut us and probably don’t put the best things into their products, but it’s a different market and it gets people coming through the centre. We will never be able to match them on the buying power, but that’s not what we’re about.”
Tell us in the comments below, do you think Coles stole Bolton’s idea?