By Victoria Masterson
ABSTINENCE from alcohol and meat in January helped to boost UK grocery sales in healthier categories, new figures reveal.
But the sector’s overall performance has been muted, with only 0.3% sales growth in the 12 weeks to 26 January compared to the previous year.
“Many people start the year with good intentions and pledges to make healthier choices following the excesses of the festive period,” said Fraser McKevitt, head of retail and consumer insight at research consultancy Kantar, which compiled the data.
“Those who committed to drinking less in January helped the retailers boost sales of non-alcoholic beer by 37% and adult soft drinks by 3%, as shoppers reached for alternatives to their favourite tipples. Of course, not everyone has been abstaining, and more than 15 million households still bought alcohol during the past four weeks.”
Retailers welcomed the return of Veganuary by launching a number of new product lines, Kantar said. These include ‘Gro’ from Co-op, ‘Plant based’ from Asda and Waitrose & Partners’ vegan range.
“It’s clear the Veganuary campaign is having an impact,” McKevitt continued. “More than twice as many consumers bought one of the supermarkets’ explicitly labelled plant-based products in January 2020 compared with the festivity-filled December 2019.”
Sales of meat substitutes such as soya mince or vegetarian burgers and sausages were 14% higher than January last year, while sales of lentils were up 6%, lettuce 10% and aubergine 14%.
But subdued overall consumer demand saw the major grocery chains lose market share, with Tesco down to 27.3% from 27.7% a year earlier, Sainsbury’s falling to 15.8% from 15.9%, Asda dropping to 14.9% from 15.3%, and Morrisons falling to 10.3% from 10.6%.
Online supermarket Ocado was the UK’s fastest growing grocer, with sales 11.2% higher than a year ago.
Discounter Lidl saw double digit growth of 11.1% year-on-year, with Aldi sales up by 5.7%. Co-op grew sales by 2.7% and Iceland’s sales grew ahead of the overall market at 1.4%.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here