Sainsbury’s is planning to lift the cap on how much its chief executive can earn even as the supermarket warns of ‘increasing pressure on the cost-of-living’ for its customers and staff.Britain’s second biggest grocer wants to raise the maximum Simon Roberts can take home to £7.3million if targets are met – far higher than the £6million previously reported.The proposal forms part of a new boardroom pay policy that will be put to shareholders in a binding vote at Sainsbury’s annual meeting next month.It comes as shoppers reel from surging food prices after the Iran war unleashed another bout of inflation as energy costs soared.Retailers are also grappling with higher National Insurance Contributions and minimum wage costs imposed by the Labour government, with the largest of them shedding 18,000 jobs in total in the past year, according to Bloomberg News.Roberts took home £5.4million last year – almost 200 times what his average employee earns.But his pay is significantly lower than the record £10.8million that Ken Murphy scooped as Tesco boss last year – 420 times that of its typical shop-floor worker. High earner: Sainsbury’s is planning to lift the cap on how much its chief executive, Simon Roberts, can earnShareholders are increasingly concerned about these yawning pay gaps, which one campaign group said were ‘hard to square’ with the fact that ‘many staff struggled to get by’.Rachel Reeves angered grocers last month when she urged them to limit how much they charge customers for basics such as bread, eggs and milk in return for lighter regulation.The Chancellor’s price control plan was slammed by Marks & Spencer chief executive Stuart Machin as ‘completely preposterous’ while others dismissed it as a bid to return to the 1970s and an attempt to turn Britain into ‘Cuba without the sunshine’.Supermarkets are regularly accused of profiteering but the big players operate on low single-digit profit margins – kept down in part by the rise of discounters Aldi and Lidl, who now account for almost £1 in every £5 spent at the tills.Tesco is Britain’s biggest grocer with a 28.2 per cent slice of the market, according to the latest data from Worldpanel by Numerator.