Saturday 22 December was the busiest shopping day of the year, with more than half of all households visited one of the grocers in a last-minute Christmas dash and 1.7 million additional customers walking through the aisles compared to the Saturday before.
Whole turkey sales fell out of favour and experienced a drop of 7% as some shoppers opted for smaller joints, such as crowns, in a bid to crack down on endless leftovers. The overall grocery market has seen a growth of 2%.
NFU Food Chain will continue to have regular conversations with the retailers to understand their plans for the upcoming months.
Morrisons
Morrisons market share declined by 0.2 percentage points to 10.6% although sales did grow by 0.1%. Through the 9 weeks up to the 6th January, total sales were up 4%. There was a change of consumer behaviour throughout the period, with often consumers trading up on items in their basket. Morrison’s are now in their fourth consecutive Christmas of growth.
Read Morrison’s full financial results here
Tesco
Tesco experienced growth of 0.6% boosted by an extra 125,000 customers, particularly visiting larger stores. Tesco was the only retailer which increased its promotional activity year-on-year, bringing in discounts such as its 29-pence pricing strategy on vegetables. Tesco’s market share now stands at 27.8% – down 0.3 percentage points compared with this time last year.
Tesco has had 12 consecutive quarters of growth. UK Christmas like for like sales showed positive growth of 2.6%, outperforming the market in UK in both volume and value terms
There has been a 95% roll out of the new “Exclusively at Tesco” range, with 82% of customers buying into the range.
Read the full announcement here
Co-op
Co-op was the only retailer to beat its 2017 growth rate, and this stands at 3.2%. Market share increased for the seventh period in a row, most recently up by 0.1 percentage points to 5.9%. With 100 new stores set to open this year – a third of which will be in London and the south east
Sainsbury's
Sainsbury’s market share dropped by 0.3 percentage points as sales fell by 0.4%. The Competition Market Authority’s verdict on the proposed Sainsbury’s-Asda merger predicted to be published in February.
For Q3, Sainsbury’s total retail sales were down 0.4% however grocery sales grew by 0.4% with convenience and online up by 6% and 3%. Their price position vs their competitors improved with £9 turkey crowns and 30p veg being extremely popular with shoppers.
Read Sainsbury's Third Quarter and Christmas trading statement
Asda
Asda’s ‘Extra Special’ range was the fastest growing of any premium line of the major retailers, helping the supermarket achieve growth of 0.7% and come out top among the big four. Asda also has a standout online performance as its e-commerce sales rocketed by 12%.
Aldi
The discounters have continued to make their mark over Christmas: two-thirds of all households shopped at either Aldi or Lidl over the 12-week period culminating in a highest-ever combined Christmas market share of 12.8%.
With sales up 10.4%, Aldi was the fastest-growing supermarket and it appears its marketing efforts are paying off – at least when it comes to vegetables. The return of Kevin the Carrot contributed to an 18% increase in carrot sales and nearly one in five households bought the vegetable at the discounter.
Lidl
Lidl experienced growth of 9.4%. Nearly one-third of the supermarket’s December growth came through sales of branded products while its ‘Deluxe’ line saw sales jump by 33% over the month
Waitrose
Waitrose & Partners gross sales were £1,047m, up 0.2% versus last year and up 0.3% on a like-for-like basis, despite reducing their promotional activity. There has been strong online growth of 12.8%.
Differentiation: Product innovation
- Increased own brand and exclusive festive products, launching over 500 new and improved Waitrose & Partners lines.
- English and Welsh wine continued its strong performance with sales growth of 21.4%.
- Free From products up 12.2%
Read the full Christmas trading statement here
M&S
M&S reported a 2.2% drop in UK like-for-like sales to £2.78bn for the third quarter ended December 29 with food sales down 2.1%
Rowe said the restructuring of the business is on track with efforts improvements to its online offering, lowering prices on food items and removing multi-buy promotions.
“In Food we started on a journey to re-engineer the range and value proposition six months ago and are now making good progress. The underlying trend reflects the transition to ‘trusted value’ as we lower prices and remove complex and confusing multi-buy promotions.”