Despite the continued upbeat trends on grocery inflation, supermarket sales remain sluggish across the UK.
According to new data released by Kantar Worldpanel, grocery inflation fell for the 16th consecutive month (12 weeks ending June 9). However, grocery sales only managed a 1.0 percentage point increase, the smallest in two years.
Wet weather may have been a factor impacting take-home sales, but it also could just be Brits exercising some caution with finances as they do their shops. Their average trips to the grocery store dipped just slightly from 16.4% to 16.3%.
“22% of households say they’re struggling, meaning that they aren’t able to cover their expenses or are just making ends meet,” Kantar said in its press release. “However, there are positive signs that many of us no longer feel the need to restrict our spending quite so much, with lower inflation helping to ease the pressure on people’s pockets.”
Sales were all over the map, some like soup sales rising a whopping 24% while prepared salads dropped 11%. Interestingly, Kantar noted that prices were falling across nearly one-third of categories, from toilet tissue to milk.
Kantar noted the importance of the coming months to grocery stores – with Wimbledon and the European Football Championships potentially ringing in big sales, provided England and Scotland both fare well.
How have retailers fared?
Much has been made of the rise of Aldi and Lidl over the past few years. Aldi, in fact, has grown in market share to reach 10% and in comfortable fourth position.
Lidl gained 0.4 percentage points during the period and sits at 8.1 but still trails fifth-place Morrisons by 0.6 percentage points. Tesco is still the runaway leader in share at 27.7, the most it has had since February of 2022. During the period it gained 0.6 percentage points. Asda is a comfortable third at 12.8%.
As for the others:
- Ocado holds just 1.8% of market share, but it had a sizzling last month in terms of sales with a 10.7% increase. The lean to online, and perhaps helped by all the rain, showed as nearly a quarter of all Brits are doing shopping from their homes.
- Morrisons saw grocery sales leap 1.1% during the run-up to June.
- Sainsbury’s (15.2% share) and Iceland both had big period three-month stretches in terms of sales, rising respectively by 4.9% and 4.4%, respectively.
- Waitrose (4.5%) managed to get 188,000 new shoppers during the period, the best of any retailer.
