Lidl share reaches record high as Aldi growth continues to slow

Lidl has made it nine months in a row as the fastest-growing bricks & mortar supermarket, as the gulf between its performance and Aldi’s widens.

Lidl’s sales were up 9.4% year on year in 12 weeks to 12 May, pushing its market share to a record-high 8.1%, up from 7.7% a year ago, according to new Kantar data today.

Aldi’s growth had slowed to 2.2%, behind the total market’s 3.6% and a far cry from the 17.1% year on year growth the discounter was enjoying nine months ago. Aldi’s market share stands at 10%, down from 10.1% a year ago. It is the third month in a row in which its growth has been slower than the market’s and its share has been down year on year.

For the first time, Kantar’s monthly market update credited Lidl’s loyalty app with helping fuel its current success, particularly in its in-store bakeries, where personalised discounts have helped push volume sales up by over 40%.

As reported by The Grocer last week, Lidl recently added to the loyalty scheme with the introduction of non-personalised discounts for all members on a weekly rotating selection of products.  

Aldi has so-far maintained it has no plans to launch its own loyalty app and even mocked the schemes on social media.

Of the traditional big four, Asda is the only retailer whose sales are down year on year, by 2%. Its market share stands at 13.1%, down from 13.9% a year ago.

It comes days after Asda finance chief Michael Gleeson claimed its Aldi and Lidl price match scheme, launched in January, was helping slow discounter share growth. Combined with other measures, such as price cuts, it had “helped limit some of the more recent impact of the combined Lidl and Aldi [market] share”, Gleeson told The Grocer in a trading update on Friday.

For the third month in a row, Ocado was the fastest growing of all major grocers. The online supermarket’s sales were up 12.4% year on year, well ahead of the total online market’s 5.4% growth.

Speaking to The Grocer earlier in May, Ocado CEO Hannah Gibson said “almost all” of M&S’s addressable range was now on the site, including 150 new items from the newly launched summer range. The positive Kantar numbers come ahead of M&S’s full-year results on Wednesday. 

Tesco’s market share has increased 0.5 percentage points year on year to reach 27.6% – its largest annual share gain since January 2022. Tesco’s 5.6% growth in sales was matched by Sainsbury’s, whose share increased 0.3 percentage points to 15.1%.

Grocery price inflation has fallen for the 15th month in a row, to 2.4%, the lowest level since October 2021.

“Grocery price inflation is gradually returning to what we would consider more normal levels,” said Fraser McKevitt, Kantar head of retail and consumer insight. “It’s now sitting only 0.8 percentage points higher than the 10-year average of 1.6% between 2012 and 2021, which is just before prices began to climb.

“Typically, an inflation rate of around 3% is when we start to see marked changes in consumers’ behaviour, with shoppers trading down to cheaper items when the rate goes above this line and vice versa when the rate drops.

“However, after nearly two-and-a-half years of rapidly rising prices, it could take a bit longer for shoppers to unwind the habits they have learnt to help them manage the cost of living crisis.”