Growth in the Northern Irish grocery market slowed slightly to 0.7% during the 52 weeks to 6 October, according to latest data from Kantar.
Volume sales fell 0.4% year-on-year and growth was driven by an average price increase of two pence per pack. While shoppers are picking up fewer items during each visit to the supermarket, this was offset slightly by the fact they made 12 extra trips on average than last year.
Commenting on individual retailer performances, Charlotte Scott, consumer insight director at Kantar, said: “Tesco’s position has improved slightly compared with last month – increasing share to 35.1% – and, with sales up 0.5%, it is once again the only big three retailer to achieve growth. Tesco is following a similar trend to the overall market, with the average number of items bought per trip down by 14.2%, although shoppers made an additional nine trips to the retailer in the past 52 weeks. Impressively, despite nearly all of Northern Irish households already buying something from Tesco during the course of a year, it has increased this further to 94.6%.
“Sainsbury’s and Asda experienced sales decline of 0.9% and 1.2% respectively. Sainsbury’s has increased its penetration of households by 4.6% over the past 12 months, with 71.0% of Northern Irish households visiting the retailer during the past year. Meanwhile, Asda encouraged its customers to visit more often – but couldn’t convince them to pick up more items while they were there. The retailer’s penetration dropped by 0.2 percentage points to 79.7%.
“Lidl is once again the only retailer to increase its market share this period compared with this time last year, gaining 0.3 percentage points. Sales were up 6.6%, driven by an 8.3% increase in the average spend per trip and finding more customers – serving 75.6% of Northern Irish shoppers in the past 12 months.”
See here for the latest Republic of Ireland grocery market share data.
