Ocado retains crown as Britain’s fastest-growing supermarket
Ocado has retained its position as Britain’s fastest growing supermarket, with the online grocer achieving its quickest growth in the North of England.
Ocado’s overall sales grew 11.2 per cent year-on-year during the quarter, with its market share rising 0.2 percentage points, according to data from Kantar.
While over half of the grocer’s sales come from London and the South of England, its quickest growth in the 12 weeks to 26 January was in the North, where sales rose 17 per cent.
Sainsbury’s recorded the best performance of the “big four” supermarkets during the period, with a 0.6 per cent drop in sales, leaving its market share marginally lower.
Tesco was the second-best performer with a decline of 0.9 per cent, while Asda and Morrisons recorded drops of 2.2 per cent and 3 per cent respectively.
“Morrisons is bucking the trend in the overall grocery market, where fewer groceries are being purchased on deal, conducting 47% of its sales through some type of promotion during the past 12 weeks, a 1.3 percentage point increase on last year’s level,” said Kantar head of retail and consumer insight Fraser McKevitt.
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Discount supermarket Lidl achieved double-digit growth of just over 11 per cent during the quarter, while rival Aldi grew 5.7 per cent.
“A key factor in the advance of the discounters has been their ability to attract additional shoppers, each welcoming more than 800,000 extra visitors through their doors in the past year, supported by strong store opening programmes,” said McKevitt.
Consumers’ good intentions following the indulgences of the festive period were very much in evidence, with Dry January helping boost sales of non-alcoholic beer by 37 per cent during the month.
The growing popularity of Veganuary also helped increase sales of meat substitutes, which rose 14 per cent compared to January last year.
However McKevitt said the growing popularity in plant-based food is “not primarily caused by a rise in the number of people following strict vegan diets – vegans still make up just two per cent of the population and only five per cent of us are vegetarian”.
“Instead the trend is being driven by many people making small changes and trying to eat more plant-based meals and the retailers are responding accordingly.”