The latest Kantar and Nielsen data showing inflation starting to bite and the discounters grabbing record share gets plenty of attention in the papers.

UK grocers are benefitting from food price inflation, says The Financial Times, as supermarket sales rise 2.3% in three months, the fastest in more than two years, according to Kantar. The Times adds that all the grocers except Asda experienced growth in the past 12 weeks. Staples such as butter, tea and fish have all increased in price by more than 5% in the period and fruit and vegetables, many of which are imported, have also gone up.

The Guardian writes that shoppers are starting to feel the pinch as the sharp fall in pound since the EU referendum feeds into big rise in food prices. Nielsen figures showed that Aldi and Lidl now control more than 12% of grocery sales in Britain, meaning nearly £1 in every £8 spent on groceries goes into the tills of the German discounters (The Telegraph).

The news that Budgens is closing 34 stores, leading to more than 800 redundancies, is picked up by most of the papers. The Guardian writes that the administrator for Food Retailer Operations Ltd failed to find buyer for nearly three dozen stores bought from Co-op in 2016. Nine of the stores were shut at the weekend, with the remaining 25 to be closed over the next fortnight (The Telegraph). “From Somerfield to Co-op, then Budgens, now bust,” The Mail writes.

The Financial Times picks up the news that Former Tesco finance chief Laurie McIlwee has joined food tycoon Ranjit Boparan to run his restaurant business, which include the Giraffe chain formely owned by the supermarket. McIlwee will become chairman of Boparan Restaurant Group assisting chief executive Tom Crowley with the execution of the strategy on the company’s restaurants (The Telegraph).

Sainsbury’s has ditched a scheme aimed at halving household food waste, according to The Guardian. The paper revealed this morning that the supermarket has dropped an ambitious £10m five-year programme after finding it was more difficult than expected to achieve behavioural change.

Just Eat beat its profit expectations as the spending spree at the business started to pay off, with foreign acquisitions making money for the first time (The Financial Times).

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