The German discounters are not simply stealing spend from the Big Four; they are boosting the fresh produce market, retail analysts have revealed.
Sales data from the Kantar Wordpanel shows that since August 2012, the average spend per trip on wholehead fresh produce at Aldi has rocketed, and while fruit and veg spend has decreased slightly at the Big Four, the discounters have been successful in getting consumers to buy more categories on each trip. This has driven growth in several sections of the market.
“Even though Aldi is cheaper, we now spend more per trip on produce [at the retailer] than we do in a Big Four supermarket,” said Kantar’s Chris Cowan at the Great British Tomato conference in Kenilworth on 29 September.
At both the discounters and the major retailers, the average spend on fruit and vegetables per trip now exceeds £4, with Aldi overtaking the major retailers back in 2015.
“What the discounters are successfully doing is getting people to buy more categories on each trip – things like [Aldi’s] Super Six getting some extra incremental purchases of extra categories and it’s working incredibly successfully.”
Prepared mango is one of the categories in which Aldi has boosted sales and achieved incremental growth, according to Cowan.The average price per pack of prepared mango is £1.91, with some retailers selling packs for as mush as £3 each. But by retailing the product at just £1.49, Aldi has been able to attract new shoppers to the category who were “turned off and weren’t buying it at other retailers,” Cowan said.
“When Aldi entered the [prepared mango] market a couple of years ago, there were big fears over whether they would devalue the category,” he explained. “But almost all of Aldi’s success with this product was by attracting new shoppers. So, yes Aldi and Lidl can grow markets and they do.”
These include “shoppers won” – consumers who have begun buying the product in a discounter as well as a major retailer – and “category arrivals” – shoppers who were not previously buying the product at all and have this year begun buying it at Aldi.
Taking all fresh produce sales into consideration, around half (47 per cent) of Aldi and Lidl’s growth has been driven by Big Four shoppers switching to the discounters. But 53 per cent of growth is accounted for by extra purchases the supermarkets have encouraged customers to make.
Cowan also points to the fact that 91 per cent of Aldi ‘s and Lidl’s fruit and veg shoppers buy produce in one of the major retailers every four weeks, showing that they have not been “lost to the discounters”, as is often suggested.
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