UK food retailers are feeling the effects of a steep fall in pork meat sales which has followed the World Health Organisation’s announcement that the consumption of it is linked to cancer, theguardian.com reports.
In the fortnight following the publication of the body’s findings, sales of bacon and sausages went down by £3 million. During the first week after the news broke, sausage sales shrunk by 13.9 per cent, and bacon sales by 16.5 per cent on a like-for-like basis.
Over three weeks have now elapsed since the WHO went public with its findings, and sales have remained broadly consistent with the first week following the disclosure.
The IRI’s head of strategic insight-retail, Martin Wood, said, “While there have been links between certain types of meat and some forms of cancer before, this announcement from a highly respected global body was picked up widely by the media and has had an immediate impact on some people’s shopping choices."
He added that high-end foods have been hit hardest: "It’s interesting that we saw these trends across all of the retailers, not just some. What came out of our analysis was that premium products were more affected overall. This may have been down to the credibility and science behind the story that resonated more with educated consumers and led them to make more informed, and possibly more expensive, alternative choices."
© 2015 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Peter Donnelly. To subscribe to ESM: The European Supermarket Magazine, click here.
