Tesco leads big four rebound as Aldi and Lidl hits five-year low
Tesco lead a comeback from the big four supermarkets over the last three months that saw Aldi and Lidl post the slowest sales growth since 2011.
Tesco enjoyed its biggest quarterly sales rise in three years.
The country’s largest supermarket posted a 2.2% jump in sales in the 12 weeks to 6 November, recorded Kantar Worldpanel. Sainsbury’s saw a slight decline (0.7%) in the period, while Morrisons slipped 2.4% in part due to last year’s closure of its convenience-store business. Asda’s sales slumped 5%, which Kantar said was the worst performance of the big four supermarkets.
“Tesco’s growth is a considerable improvement on the numbers it was delivering this time last year,” Fraser McKevitt, head of retail and consumer insight at Kantar Worldpanel. “Most of the gains were made through its own-label products, both at the cheaper and more premium ends of the price spectrum.”
Kantar’s findings were backed by Nielsen, which found that over a similar period the combined growth of Aldi and Lidl was at its lowest point since 2011. Both the German discounters, which have done so much to disrupt their larger counterparts with their no-frills approach to grocery, posted gains of 11.2% (Aldi) and 5.2% (Lidl) in the 12 weeks to 5 November. Despite the slowdown, their current growth still outpaces the 1.4% rate across the whole UK grocery market.