Senior buyer for biscuits, Budgens For Budgens, biscuits are performing extremely well and business is increasing by around 25% year-on-year. A lot of this is down to a project we started two years ago with McVitie's to review and refine our total biscuit offer. We took approximately 80 product duplications off the shelf to release space for new products and for current lines such as everyday biscuits, Homewheat and Digestives. This took sales up by about 12%. We pushed sales further by highlighting beacon brands alongside strong price promotional activity. The best performance came from countlines such as Kit Kat, Penguin and Twix. Other areas have seen improvements, too. Standard biscuits like custard creams still have a place on the shelves and we've improved sales of these old fashioned favourites through better planogramming. They continue to sell through all our stores, but probably do best in the village and out of London branches, while luxury biscuits sell best in our Metro' outlets. Packaging has seen some interesting developments, with tubes and handy pack sizes clearly benefiting sales. These take biscuits into the food-to-go category, which is very positive since it's such an important ­ and growing ­ area of the food retail business. {{P&P }}

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