Focus on: UK food consumption habits

In this period I’m working a lot with food companies that want to position their brand internationally and need to know more about their markets before we can define their strategic plan. Here is a gift, some data concerning the Brits’ food consumption habits.

The UK’s Food and Drink Industry is a dynamic and fast-moving market that reached an annual sale of £111 billions, according to Attest 2017 data: £60.1bn in grocery shopping, £24.3bn eating out, and £26.5bn spent on takeaways and deliveries. In 2017 the UK’s weekly household grocery spending increased 7.7% compared to 2016 reaching £61.14.

Considering the data, Brits don’t seem to enjoy cooking. Only 15% of them typically make freshly prepared evening meals 5 times per week and 32% usually prepare less than 2 meals per week (3% never cook). On the contrary, they love eating out for breakfast (15.4%), for lunch (29.5%, considering also eating at work), for dinner (15.7%) or just for having a snack (39.4%).

It is interesting to notice that, when eating at work, most Brits choose to take a packed lunch (46.2%) or buy something from a local shop (26.3%), just 7.3% of them eat out and 6.1% order lunch in at the office. To summarise, 87.4% of people spend less than £7 pounds for their lunch (59.2% less than £5).

Focusing on dining out, the majority of people treat themselves to an evening meal once a week (51.6%) or more (15.7% twice; 3.6% 3-4 times; 2.1% more than 5 times). Although 27% of consumers never eat out, 55.3% of Brits orders takeaway when they don’t cook for themselves: 59% order takeaways once a week, 17% order twice. The most popular takeaway food is pizza (27.6%), followed by Chinese (26.7%). Mostly, the average spend for takeaway is £11-20 (49.1%), the order is made online (31.1%) or via app (29.7%), and the phone remains strongly used (25.5%). Nationwide, 55.8% will order elsewhere if a takeaway is unable to deliver.

Could you imagine all this?
If you’ve got a business idea and you’d like to support it with a market analysis, I would love to hear from you.