Skip to main content

More winners and losers

The Financial Times published a quick guide to US grocery sales last week, pinpointing the products that are in and those that are out.

The winners are: ice cream and cakes, performance drinks, glazed popcorn, frozen chickens and nut butter. The losers are: eyewear, cheese slices, cola, film and disposable cameras, and crisps in a tube.

The reasons are: more children's parties at home; these drinks are "costlier but healthier" than cola; evenings in watching movies; prepared boneless birds cost more; "healthier" breakfasts and packed lunches. And they are: sunglasses are a luxury, impulse buy; higher prices; fizzy drinks lose out to smoothies; camera phones; and fewer "impulse" buys of pricier potato snacks.

What can the local shop make of this? Healthier still seems to work and impulse seems to be under pressure. Even better, analyse your own top five growing categories and your top five fallers and see what it tells you about your shoppers.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Digital disruption in the UK wholesale space

“Twenty years ago I was driving boxes to the post office in my Chevy Blazer and dreaming of a forklift,” says Jeff Bezos in his most recent letter to shareholders. A blink later and he points out that the company has grown from 30,000 employees in 2010 to 230,000 now. But his ambition is the same. “We want to be a large company that’s also an invention machine. We want to combine the extraordinary customer-serving capabilities that are enabled by size with the speed of movement, nimbleness and risk-acceptance mentality that is normally associated with entrepreneurial start-ups.” Amazon is great at disruption because of its customers focus and the fact that the internet means it needs none (or very few) people between its warehouses and the shopper. The threat of Prime, its membership service, is the biggest challenge facing the UK retail market and the wholesale market by extension. It is both a direct threat and an indirect threat in that is inspiring countless numbers of othe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Traffic lights: a fuss about nothing

I am sure that FT columnist Michael Skapinker has written about traffic lights food labelling before and his latest article is provocatively called: The food companies that make people fat. He criticises Coca-Cola and Unilever for sticking with guideline daily amounts (GDAs) when traffic lights work much better. Former Walmart Europe public affairs head Bernard Hughes wrote in to support Skapinker. He said: "There isn't ever a perfect information system flowing with beautiful logic. But traffic lights give powerful direction to the busy consumer." But in this age of smart phones surely this debate over the labelling on the packaging is easily overcome. The government can simply issue an app that when held over a bar code provides shoppers with a traffic light system. The supermarkets could do this on their websites. Surely the whole point about the future is that the internet and limitless data storage means that the shopper is being empowered with the informatio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tough times need tough benchmarks

Underneath the hype, the Christmas announcements by the major grocers demonstrate tough trading conditions, with Tesco saying that like-for-like sales in the UK were up by just 0.6 per cent. The analysts will be having this in negative territory in no time. The impact of Tesco's investment in new space is a 3.6 per cent increase in sales yet the Kantar Worldpanel figures show its market share remains unchanged at 30.5 per cent. The two sets of figures are not strictly aligned but local retailers can see the picture. Across at Sainsbury, which is doing well, the Kantar Worldpanel figures show it adding 0.3 per cent of market share to 16.6 per cent, just behind Asda on 16.8 per cent (which lost a 10th of a basis point). Sainsbury reported like-for-like sales growth of 3.6 per cent but City analysts cut this down to almost zero after stripping out new space, VAT and food price inflation. The Tesco press release highlighted "Steady UK Performance" and Sainsbury trumpete...
2 comments
Read more