Seasons beatings

While summer doesn’t see an overall boost in total food and drink sales some items regularly sell better in the warmer months, including cider and beer. Last year two of the fastest growing drinks brands in Scottish off-trade were Strongbow Dark Fruit and Corona. RTDs also do well in summer. In soft drinks one of the biggest sales boosts from the “summer effect” is seen in fruit squashes. Around six in every 10 shoppers will buy squash over the summer months.
While summer doesn’t see an overall boost in total food and drink sales some items regularly sell better in the warmer months, including cider and beer. Last year two of the fastest growing drinks brands in Scottish off-trade were Strongbow Dark Fruit and Corona. RTDs also do well in summer. In soft drinks one of the biggest sales boosts from the “summer effect” is seen in fruit squashes. Around six in every 10 shoppers will buy squash over the summer months.

Summer should give a helping hand to sales of many, but not necessarily all, drinks. Who are the champs of June, July and August?

SUMMER can be a good time for many c-stores but there’s very little doubt that great weather helps. Shopping patterns have seen dramatic change in recent years, of course, but traditionally summer was a time when other family activities took priority over long hot supermarket shopping visits and demand in c-stores for ready-chilled single-serve soft drinks boomed.
But it can actually be quite a complicated sales period. Both this year and last we asked the expert shopping researchers at Kantar Worldpanel to give us some insight into the importance of summer to food and drink retail.
Last year it became apparent that summer is not a period of overall or uniform boom.
Kantar Worldpanel found that the 12 weeks of the June, July and August period we see as the Scottish summer only accounted for 22% of total sales – no more than other times.
But some foods and many drinks are in high demand during the summer including ice cream, burgers, fruit and veg and many types of long drink including beers, wines, spirits and soft drinks.
Cider was 25% more likely to capture consumer spend during the summer than in the year overall. Beer rates of sale jumped by 13% compared to the all-year average.
And certain soft drinks showed big increases in rate of sale too – especially mineral water and fruit squash as well as canned carbonates and yogurt drinks.
This year Amanda Brown, Kantar Worldpanel’s strategic insight director – Scotland, updated us.
The trends were similar, as we might expect. Spending on food and drink in summer 2015 was just about the amount you might predict for a regular 12-week period.
But 43% of all cash spent in the year on sun care products was spent during the summer months. And in foods there’s a distinct summer boost for salads, salad accompaniments and barbecue foods.
On drinks, in addition to the beer and cider sales share increases noted last year it’s also clear that flavoured alcoholic beverages (FABs or RTDs), lines like WKD, Hooch and others, see some of their best sales in the summer months.
In soft drinks canned and bottled carbonates do well, as do tonic water and bitter lemon drinks. With the major gin revival that might be even more marked this year.
Almost 60% of shoppers will purchase fruit squash over the summer months, Amanda Brown said. And on average each of them will buy fruit squash over four times over the three main summer months.

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