Insight: grocery market boosted by warm weather and Royal Wedding
New figures on the UK grocery market for the 12 weeks to 20 May have shown that hot weather combined with the Royal Wedding helped the market to grow by 2.7% year-on-year.
The data from Kantar Worldpanel reveals that the Friday before the day of the wedding and the FA Cup Final showed a particularly noticeable spike in sales, with grocers taking £415 million over the 24 hours.
Chris Hayward, consumer specialist at Kantar Worldpanel, said: “The sun shone on the grocery market over the past month with record-breaking temperatures, a bank holiday weekend and Royal Wedding fever all contributing to a bumper period.“
Looking at individual retailers, Morrisons performed particularly well with a sales increase of 2.9% to mark 19 consecutive periods of sales growth. This meant it held its market share at 10.5% after an additional 311,000 shoppers went through its doors.
Asda saw sales growth of 2.8% after trade was boosted by an increase in spend per shopping trip – up £0.56 to £26.88 on average.
Meanwhile, Tesco experienced a sales increase of 2.2% despite dropping its market share by 0.1 percentage points to 27.7%. Sainsbury’s first increase in promotional activity in three years helped boost sales by 1% year-on-year, although the retailer’s market share fell back by 0.2 percentage points to 15.7%.
At Lidl sales rose by 10.4% after branded sales played a pivotal role for the discounter, accounting for 30% of its growth. Its market shares was 5.4% in the period. Aldi also performed well with sales up 6.7% and its market share edging up 0.3 percentage points to 7.3%.
While the disposal of 300 McColls stores is still impacting headline performance, the Co-op achieved sales growth of 1.5%. Despite experiencing marginal year-on-year sales growth of 0.3%, Waitrose saw its market share fall back by 0.1 percentage points to 5.1%.
Iceland also dropped market share by 0.1 percentage points, although the retailer’s sales rose by 0.8%. Meanwhile, Ocado attracted an additional 132,000 new households in the 12 week period which helped its year-on-year sales to increase by 12.7%.
