Inside Business Market Research | Soft Drinks A YEAR IN SOFT DRINKS
Every year Britvic produces an overview of the soft drinks market which provides a big-picture view of the take-home market in both the multiples and in impulse. Consequently it can’t deliver a precise picture of Scottish convenience but it does offer useful insight into the prevailing trends.
BY KEVIN SCOTT I
t’s a complex category, soft drinks. There’s one supplier telling you to arrange your fixture one way, and another telling you what looks like the complete opposite. Whatever planogram retailers decide on, one thing they must be absolutely certain of is that their range is right – and that means best-sellers, not slow-shifters. There’s many ways to work this out – your own EPoS data being the most reliable, however keeping an eye on wide industry trends also helps. The annual Britvic Soft Drinks report is a useful tool in that sense, even if it does just look at the UK-wide picture and includes the mults as well as impulse. So it doesn’t provide any concrete answers but it definitely acts as an indicator. But what does it indicate? Well, cola continues to be the leading segment, and grew 8% by value and 4% by volume. Bottom line: this is good news. When a sub-category as strong as cola has value growth ahead of volume growth it’s cause for optimism. The resilience of the soft drinks market in the wake of the recession has been nothing short of remarkable. Every year it has continued to grow, with pure juice, for example, up 4% by value (against a 5% volume drop), and ‘glucose and stimulant’ drinks (energy drinks to you and me) up 17% in value and +14% in volume. But what of the impulse channel? That’s what we’re really interested in here. Sales in small independents grew by just 1% in value, with volume falling by 2%. Not so encouraging, but the report says changing shopping habits have made a fundamental difference to the category, as Britvic Customer Management Director Murray Harris says: “Instead of sticking with one retailer, shoppers used a variety of grocery outlets: the major supermarkets for the trolley shop and smaller local shops to top-up on essentials, with the impulse channel matching the grocery multiple channel’s value growth of 7% for take-home soft drinks.” Interestingly, online sales increased by 12% in 2011, proving a way of saving on fuel and
28 SLR | MAY 2012 £7bn
Britvic Soft Drinks Report What’s
flying...and what’s dying?
– overall value of UK soft drinks market
Good Year Cola
Good year – 22% share of take-home market. Cold Hot Drinks
Ice-tea and the like, strong 24% volume growth. Dairy Drinks
3% value increase, stronger than recent years. Sports Drinks
Lucozade drives 4% value growth. Fruit Carbs
10% value and 4% volume growth, though Irn- Bru would make Scottish stats very different.
Water Plus One to watch. Value up 10%, volume up 6%.
Energy
Strong 17% value growth – keep an eye on citrus flavours, up 326% last year.
Smoothies
Innocent’s discounting drives a 10% volume uplift, though heavily multiple-skewed.
Plain water
5% value increase for second year running. Mixed Year
Pure Juice Value up 4%, volume down 5%. Squash
6% volume decline, but value up 4%.
allowing consumers to see and control what they are spending. Online sales, of course, are unlikely to be a good thing for local retailers – unless you’re doing a website-based home delivery service – but it’s worth keeping an eye on how that market develops. For now, the important thing is to ensure that shoppers are buying as much as you can sell them.
Juice Drinks Value up 1%, volume down by 1%. Bad Year
Lemonade Volume drop of 4%.
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