Supervalu remains the country’s biggest supermarket as it continues to capitalise on consumers’ growing preference for healthier products. The retailer continues to top the pile in Ireland with a market share of 23%, beating Tesco into second place with 22.2%, while Dunnes Stores has a 21.5% share of the grocery market in third place.
SuperValu continued to encourage shoppers to spend more at the tills and cashed in on strong growth in sales of fresh food in the opening three months of the year. “SuperValu remains the largest supermarket in Ireland, capturing 23% of consumer spend on groceries and increasing sales by 2.8% year-on-year,” said Kantar Worldpanel Director David Berry.
“We’ve seen consumers continue to allocate more of their shopping budget to fresh food over the past four years, and SuperValu has managed to capitalise on this very successfully.
“Most recently the retailer launched its ‘Good Food Karma’ campaign, which aims to inspire the general public to cook from scratch using fresh ingredients.
“The retailer saw strong growth across fresh staples in the past 12 weeks as a result: sales of fruit, vegetables, meat and poultry all saw healthy increases.”
Dunnes Stores’ sales growth reached an impressive 8% according to the Kantar Worldpanel data with its ‘Shop and Save’ campaign encouraging shoppers to spend an additional €2.50 on each visit.
Tesco’s performance has been sustained by a different approach. The value of its sales have dipped by 0.7% but in volume terms are up by 2.7%. This reflects Tesco’s investment in low prices which has seen it win back customers and seen it sell more items this year, albeit at slightly lower prices.
In this dataset, Kantar Worldpanel has increased its sample size from 3,000 to 5,000 households and monthly supermarket share data updated to reflect the increase. Growth trends are unaffected as historic data has been reworked, the company said.
Discount retailer Aldi hailed it “as an unprecedented restatement of shopping behaviour in Ireland showing Aldi has now captured 10.9% of the market”. “Over 1.35m households shopped at one of our 124 Irish stores in the past 12 months – four out of every five homes in the country,” said Aldi Group Buying Director Finbar McCarthy.
Fellow German discounter Lidl has maintained its position as the country’s fastest growing retailer though. This year, it has attracted an additional 43,000 shoppers and now holds an 11.2% share of the market.
A new trend has emerged whereby shoppers are making smaller but more frequent supermarket visits, Mr Berry said. “As competition amongst the main grocery retailers remains intense, we’re actually seeing shoppers visit stores more often,” he said. “Over the latest 12 weeks the average household has made 63 separate shopping trips for grocery items, an additional four trips compared with last year.”
Peter O’Dwyer
Irish Examiner
