Grocery ‘resilient’ despite cooler weather hitting booze sales

This spring’s cooler weather saw booze sales fall across the grocery market, but the sector remains resilient, according to the latest results from industry analysts Kantar.

The overall grocery sector grew 1.3% in the 12 weeks to 19 May, the latest figures showed, but suffered from strong comparables with last year’s scorching May weather, which benefitted from the double-whammy of the FA Cup and the royal wedding.

As a result of the comparatively cooler weather, beer and lager sales fell 7% over the last four weeks compared to the previous year.

Chris Hayward, consumer specialist at Kantar, said May was always likely to be challenging for grocers when comparing year-on-year performance as the cooler weather impacted discretionary spending, but said the wider grocery market was proving resilient.

“Growth of 1.3% may appear modest when compared with last year’s 2.7%, however, the sector continues to demonstrate resilience and volume sales remain unchanged from last year,” he said, adding that the summer’s sports were likely to prove a boost.

“We have two European football finals with British interest, the Cricket World Cup and the FIFA Women’s World Cup to look forward to in the coming weeks and retailers will be aiming to capitalise on these events and attract more shoppers throughout summer.”

The discounters continued to attract a strong audience with a combined share of 13.8%, with Aldi’s 11.1% growth contributing to a strong 8% market share (up from 7.3% last year), while Lidl also saw growth of 8.5% and its market share rose 0.4 percentage points to 5.9%. This means it is slowly narrowing the gap with The Co-op, whose market share of 6.1% received a boost from strong sales of 3.7% (particularly notable given its strong sales last year). Waitrose also scraped growth of 0.1%, ahead of Tesco, whose sales were flat.

Tescso still dominates the big four, with a market share of 27.3%, down from the same period last year but still well ahead of Sainsbury’s and Asda, who are level pegging at 15.2%. Both supermarkets saw sales fall, by 1.7% and 0.2% respectively, while Morrisons saw sales down 0.4%, as its market share dipped by a percentage point.

The symbol groups and independents also saw sales down 2%, taking their market share down by 0.1 percentage points to 1.7% of the total market.