Even England being knocked out of the World Cup hasn’t dampened recent heightened interest in the meat, fish and poultry market, according to Kantar Worldpanel.
The organisation’s latest Meat, Fish & Poultry (MFP) update covering the 12 weeks to 15th July reveals that sunny weather has helped sales, with the stand out performer – burgers and grills – performing even better than last month.
A total of 1.2m more shoppers bought burgers, and they featured in 4.2m more trips. Chilled fish is also gaining traction and seeing additional shoppers.
Nathan Ward, business unit director for MFP, explains: “We’ve recently seen chilled fish return to growth and that accelerates this month, with natural fish returning to strong sales. Shoppers made 1.5m more trips than last year, with a third of us buying the category over the last quarter.
“Inflation continues have an impact – sending prices up by 2.3% – but this pales into insignificance compared to the peaks of last year.”
Older households remain the key market for chilled fish, and these shoppers are driving category growth, picking up an additional one million kilos over the last year.
Salmon, cod and prawns are seeing the strongest growth, helping to drive both value and volume back into the category.
Poultry remains another big winner, with both the primary and processed markets showing strong growth.
Primary chicken is now key to the growth, with volumes up 6.6% as 611,000 more shoppers bought into the market, taking 2.7 million more trips.
The MFP markets have all benefitted strongly from the heatwave as the nation continues to fire up the coals on their barbeques – but with rain coinciding with schools breaking up for summer, we will have to wait and see whether the figures continue.
