Despite fierce retail competition on price, lowering fresh produce prices is not necessarily an effective way of growing a category, Kantar has revealed.
Speaking at FPJ Live on 4 May, Kantar’s fresh produce analyst Chris Cowan said there were no “broad rules of thumb that decreasing prices will grow a category.'
He added:' You can play around with price a lot with produce but it doesn’t necessarily shift the volumes because there are lots of other things that will affect why people buy produce.”
Cowan found no correlation between price reductions and spend in cauliflower, blueberries, potatoes or courgettes, adding that when a retailer decreases its prices on a certain product the likelihood of growing that category is only “about 50-50”.
Since the Brexit referendum, however, most fruit and vegetable prices have increased slightly due to the devaluation of the pound.
The most important things to shoppers, according to Kantar data are instead that a shop is “easy to get to” or is their “usual store”. “Good prices” ranked as consumers’ third-most important consideration, ahead of the quality of products in fourth place.
The consumer insight analyst stressed that lots of other factors affect why people buy produce, saying that shopper concerns surrounding health play “quite an important” role.
The main concern is sugar intake, which has featured heavily in the press in recent months amid the announcement of a sugary drinks tax in March, but a move away from carbohydrates is also an ongoing theme in fresh produce consumption.
Cowan said that “social media noise” about the negative effects of carbohydrates and how eating them to excess can make you gain weight, are reducing volume sales in potatoes.
Drawing on data from the Kantar Worldpanel, which tracks the take-home purchases of 30,000 UK households, he said a quarter of panellists were concerned about carbohydrates and two-thirds plan to reduce their intake in the next year.
“There is a tangible link here between what people think and what they do,” he said. However, Cowan warned against reading too much into what consumers say they will do when it comes to eating more healthily.
“People will talk about things that they are worried about but they don’t always act upon them,” he stressed. For example, the shoppers who told Kantar they planned to cut out carbohydrates completely (one per cent), actually increased their volume spend by almost ten per cent.
