One third more shopping trips than Christmas (and other amazing facts)

Chris Morley, Managing Director, Kantar Worldpanel UK & IRE, USA at Kantar

Chris Morley is MD at Kantar Worldpanel and a guest contributor to GCSF continues to discuss shopper’s changing habits during coronavirus lockdown. In his last article he looked at what caused empty shelves in supermarkets at the end of February and the first week of March. The main driver was shoppers (in their millions), adding a few more purchases from many categories across the store.

A few days after that article was written, the nation moved to what has been described as a full lock-down. According to Kantar Worldpanel, here is what has been happening since.

“With everyone now at home, here are the increases in food, drink and snacking occasions that now need to be catered for each week. Breakfast +32 million, lunch +163 million, evening meals +113 million, snacking +195 million. OK, so that is 503 million more at home occasions to serve up or in some cases ordered in, so how has this played out online and in stores?”

Presumably online sales boomed and each trolley was overflowing, right?

“At one point last weekend, we were 4,000th in the queue for our favourite online grocery delivery store. Several have reported a tenfold increase in demand. Yet such is the difficulty in adding capacity immediately and in such difficult circumstances, that the tireless delivery drivers were only able to deliver 13% more groceries to homes.

In contrast, standard bricks and mortar sold around 19% more and convenience stores were up around 30% in four weeks to the 22nd March. Overall in this period, grocery sales grew a whopping 20% (that is £10.8 billion sales in total).

This was achieved due to an astounding number of extra trips. On average, each household went shopping for groceries twenty times in these four weeks. In the week of 22nd March that meant one third more trips than the week before Christmas.

The difference in purchasing across the nation was large, but one in five households increased their overall purchasing at grocery by 50% or more. Spend per trip was up, but given the volumes we are seeing, very modestly at just 5% or £19 per trip.”

So, what happens next?

“Much of our time is now consumed trying to help forecast what the next few weeks will look like and measure weekly behaviour against these hypotheses to refine the model.

There is no doubt that the dramatic increase in occasions catered for at home is a huge factor, but there has also been evidence of stocking up all the way through the crisis. Frozen food and cupboard ready categories have seen very large increases in sales and there will definitely be a proportion of the ‘what goes up must come down’ factor for some categories.

In terms of replenishment, we have already seen brands and retailers focus on a more limited set of core lines, to maintain better stock levels and social distancing in stores and other factors will impact things too, such as a decline in impulse purchasing.”

If you would like more details on the data quoted in this article, Kantar hosted the following webinar: Resilience in Retail and have dedicated Corona-virus content; its impacts and what Kantar can do to here: Kantar Corona-virus