Grocery sales have slowed down considerably since the April high brought about by hot weather, Easter and the Royal wedding.
New figures from Kantar Worldpanel show that retail sales growth slowed to 2.5 per cent in the last month, having shot ahead at 7.8 per cent in the four weeks to 15 May.
Kantar has continued to highlight what it calls a “two nations effect” emerging, with both the high-end retailers and hard discounters recording the most impressive growth this year.
Aldi and Lidl have both grown sales by nearly 18 per cent year-on-year, while Waitrose’s sales have also risen by a market average-beating 8.9 per cent.
“The discounters are attracting some new customers but most of their growth is coming from gaining a greater share of the household shopping list,” said Kantar communications director Ed Garner.
“Customers are making a main shopping trip to their favourite store and this is then ‘topped up’ with selective shopping at the discounter - this has been dubbed ‘canny shopping’.”
Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons have maintained their market share at similar levels to a year ago, but Asda’s has fallen from 16.7 per cent in 2010 to 16.3 per cent now.
That leaves Asda with a wafer-thin advantage of 0.1 per cent over Sainsbury’s in the race to be the UK’s number-two supermarket.
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