The average price of seafood sold in the U.K. retail channel has increased by more than 6 percent over the past year but the number of actual products sold has continued to decline, finds the latest Nielsen ScanTrack data supplied by the U.K. Seafish Authority.
Shoppers paid an average GBP 2.84 (USD 3.73, EUR 3.23) per seafood item for the 52 weeks ending 19 May 2018, an increase of 6.3 percent year-on-year, which also equated to a per-kg average price rise of 6.8 percent at GBP 10.39 (USD 13.64, EUR 11.83).
These rising prices contributed to a total sales value of GBP 3.28 billion (USD 4.3 billion, EUR 3.7 billion), up 3.5 percent, but the total volume of seafood purchased fell by 3.1 percent to 315,471 metric tons (MT), and the overall number of units sold in retail fell by 2.6 percent to less than 1.2 million units.
Seafish’s figures also confirmed that chilled seafood, which accounts for almost two-thirds of total retail sales, achieved a 3.2-percent growth in sales value, exceeding GBP 2.1 billion (USD 2.8 billion, EUR 2.4 billion) for the 12-month period. However, shoppers bought less of these products (volume and units) than they did a year previously and paid a lot more for them. In volume terms, chilled sales amounted to 150,708 MT, or 611,888 unit sales, with an average price across the category of GBP 13.99 (USD 18.38, EUR 15.93) per kg or GBP 3.45 (USD 4.53, EUR 3.93) per unit.
Meanwhile, the value of the frozen seafood category increased by 4.8 percent to GBP 737.2 million (USD 970.7 million, EUR 841 million), and ambient seafood sales grew by 3.2 percent to GBP 433.8 million (USD 572.3 million, EUR 495.8 million). The volume and number of units sold in frozen were down 1.9 percent and up 0.4 percent respectively, while in ambient they declined by 8.3 percent and 6.1 percent.
Frozen and ambient sales accounted for 22.5 percent and 13.2 percent of the U.K. retail market respectively.
In terms of the species sold across all categories, the U.K. retail market was led by salmon with total sales of GBP 922.1 million (USD 1.2 billion, EUR 1.1 billion), up 4 percent year-on-year, which was based on a volume of 51,555 MT (down 7 percent) and unit sales of 224.7 million (down 7.6 percent). Cod and tuna followed with sales values of almost GBP 413 million (USD 544.9 million, EUR 472 million) and GBP 330.5 million (USD 436 million, EUR 377.7 million) respectively.
The price per kg for these three species increased by 11.9 percent, 6.4 percent and 14.8 percent respectively.
With 22.9 percent of the total sales value, Tesco continued to be the country’s leading seafood retailer, followed by Sainsbury’s with 15 percent and Aldi with 9.9 percent, although Aldi was the only one of the three to grow its market share. Indeed the discounter showed the most growth of all seafood retailers in the market.
