According to retail and FMCG market
intelligence company IRI, the supermarkets missed out on Easter egg sales this
year, to the benefit of smaller and convenience stores who held their nerve
with stock right up until the day. So the message is that Easter confectionery sales, whilst
good, could actually have been greater than they were.
Measuring sales across all of the major UK grocery
multiples, IRI suggests that Easter confectionery was up 8.6% during the five
week period before Easter Saturday; better than expected.
March saw plenty of heavy promotional
activity in some supermarkets and this helped to drive sales upwards – volume rising
by 15.1% on last year.
Despite all of this growth, IRI has estimated
that a whopping £5.2m of confectionery sales was missed out on during the final
week before Easter Day.
“We’ve seen some reports suggesting that
supermarkets were running out of eggs in the final week before Easter,”
according to Martin Wood, Head of Strategic Insight – Retail for IRI. “So while
sales did increase in that final week, they didn’t increase as much as they had
in the earlier pre-Easter period starting in early March. I would estimate that
the missed opportunity was £5.2m – this is the difference between the increase
in sales that occurred in the final week and the increase that would have
happened if the average sales growth over the 5-week Lent period had been
maintained.”
What this suggests to us is that we’re seeing
a resurgence of seasonal event management in retail this year, following strong
Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day sales. But it’s also clear that the major
supermarkets underestimated the demand for Easter and that other retailers,
like convenience stores, benefitted from this. It’s reasonable to assume that
they could have done a lot better this year if they hadn’t sold out of eggs!”
