 Hello, good afternoon. My name is Judith Mason and I'd like to welcome you to today's webinar Express, the UK food and drink market 2020 and beyond, where to now, organised by the CIM food, drink and agriculture group. Before we get started, I'd just like to go over a few things so you know how the event will work and how to participate. The presentation will last for approximately 30 to 35 minutes followed by a short 10 minute Q&A session. You'll be able to post any questions you have by typing into the ask a question chat box in the Q&A panel, which you'll see on the right hand side of your screen if watching on a laptop or across the top if you're watching on a tablet or smartphone. You can send in your questions at any time during the presentation and will attempt to answer as many as we can during the Q&A session at the end. If you want to share your thoughts on social media, we're using the hashtag CIM events. The webinar is being recorded and we'll share the link to the recording with you over the next few days. And finally, you'll also be emailed a short feedback survey after the event, which we'd love you to complete. It'll only take a few minutes and all survey responses are anonymous, so please do let us know your thoughts. So I'd now like to hand you over to Andrew Walker, who is our guest speaker today. Andrew. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining. So for the next half an hour or so, I'm going to talk you through what we've experienced in 2020 in the food and drink industry, but probably more importantly, what this most abnormal of years can tell us about what we can expect to come next. I'm going to do that through four lenses. The first one I've called new lifestyles and new priorities. So obviously all of our lives have been changed through 2020, but I want to talk about how that has run through into changing how we think, what we prioritise and ultimately what we buy. I'm then going to hone in a little bit more on shopping and talk about how our shopping has changed, but also how that changes, how we choose what we're going to buy, and therefore how it changes, how marketers should look to influence shoppers. Then I'm going to talk about the brands that have seen the most success through 2020 and really emphasise that the rules of brand growth haven't really changed in 2020, but we can learn a little bit from the specific examples of the real success stories of the last 12 months. And then finally, looking more directly into 2021, a few of the things we think are going to be top of mind for customers and consumers alike as you take your products out there in the world in 2021. Very briefly, before I get into the meat of the presentation, I wanted to talk briefly about the data I'll be using or the data I'll be referring to. So I'm here representing Kantar, primarily what I'm going to be talking about today is the behavioural data that we draw from our consumer panels. Primarily our purchasing panels, so our ongoing tracking of people's purchasing habits through barcode scanning in the home or on the go, and also some examples from our consumption panels where we use a subset of those people to tell us about what they're eating, why they're eating and how they're eating it. So that's the context of the data I'll be referring to, and now we'll crack on with the detail. So, as I said, the first section I've called New Lifestyles, New Priorities, and actually the first bit of data isn't from Kantar at all, it's from Google, and it's used to set the scene for the change in the way in which we're living our lives in 2020. So what you look at here is data from mobile phone tracking, which is looking at the year on year change and the amount of time we're spending in different locations. And there's probably things on here you'll all be familiar with. So the increase, the big increase in the green, which is increasing time spent in parks and recreational areas, particularly through the summer. The red, which is the increase in time spent at home, it's a smaller percentage change, but do bear in mind we'll spend a lot of time at home anyway. And then all the lines underneath, so less time in grocery stores, less time travelling obviously, less time for most of us in the workplace and less time in retail and recreation. None of that will be a surprise, but I think it's important that we reiterate both the extent of the change in how we're living our lives and the fact that those changes of although they're not at the extent they were in April, they're stubbornly remaining through November. And we should take that as a sign that it will be well into 2021, if not further before we see a return to the lifestyles that people were living in 2019. And what that means is that not just we're in different locations, but we think differently and we have different concerns. So to crudely characterise it, I think last year you would have had a lot of people complaining that their life is too busy and I'm constantly rushing around, and this year it's almost the opposite that people are complaining that they don't get out and about often enough. And what that does is ring true into a lot of different changes in the choices that we make and what we prioritise. So we've been running surveys throughout the year asking people about things that they're doing differently as a result of the pandemic. And two points to make here. One is obviously we're doing different things, but the other is that there's quite a lot of variation depending on your life stage and depending on your, how your situation has been affected by what has gone on this year. So if you look at the left-hand side first and think about those under the age of 34, either Gen Z or millennials, and there you see, highlighted in orange, you see higher use of social media, higher use of online media for those two groups being very prominent in those top five things that those people are doing more of. Whereas as we move to the right-hand side, we see the things in green become more prominent, things about health, eating more healthily, but particularly hygiene, which sort of steadily moves up the ranking as we move through to talk about the older consumers who would have inevitably greater concerns about exposure to the pandemic. But the point of showing this is, yes, all of our lives are being changed, but we need to be conscious that they're being changed in different ways over the course of the year, depending on our scenarios, and therefore our reaction into next year is likely to be different as well. If we get into some of the behavioural data I referred to at the beginning, what has also changed is how we choose and what we prioritise when we're choosing what we eat and drink. So in our consumption panel, which I referred to earlier, everything that people record as having consumed, we ask them about a reason for choice and they can give us a number of reasons for choice for each thing that they've chosen. First of all, we need to know the growing need states that people have referred to through the first half of 2020 up to July. And you see two big themes here. One is the seeking variety, and that's as people have been stuck in their homes more, they've had less availability of hospitality, and indeed seeking variety. So people seeking variety and they're seeking treats. So you see things like provider varied diet, a treat or reward, things that are asked for by the kids, things that add extra flavour. So those kind of things have become more important to us, as our options have become more limited in terms of how we spend our time and what we can do. And that rings true into what we end up buying as well. So this is going into the shopping behavioural data and looking at the fastest growing food and drink categories this year on the left-hand side, and the weakest performing food and drink categories on the right-hand side. And on the left-hand side, you see those things relating to variety and things relating to home baking and alcohol as well, which is where out-of-home experiences have been taken into the home due to the closure of a lot of the on-trade. And then on the right-hand side, you see fit categories that rely more on convenience and people being out and about and people taking lunch boxes to school or to work, those categories have suffered. So the point of this first section is just to set that context that as our lives have changed and our locations have changed, so our needs have changed and so the things that we're buying have changed as well. To summarise that, new lifestyles absolutely mean new needs. The focus on the home won't just be for 2020, we can see that those changes in location are stubbornly remaining where they are and they're unlikely to change in the immediate future. And we can expect diversity and the reaction in 2021 because there is diversity in the way people have responded in 2020. So hygiene and health very high on the agenda for older consumers. The youth will be looking for a release from all that time spent on social media and treating will remain important for all because the challenges of life that we face this year, some of them will carry on into next year and will be hit by the greater recessionary pressure as some of the economic reality starts to bite. So people looking for those little releases and little treats in and around the home will be even more important in 2021. So now I'm going to talk a bit more about shopping, so I've talked about what people need and what they buy, but I just wanted to talk about how they're sourcing those products and how they're shopping as well. And this is a long term view of grocery shopping in the UK. So the two measures you're looking at here are frequency, so the average number of trips that people make in a week and trip spend which is the average amount that people spend per trip. And resolutely across the last decade and you can roll these charts back even further as well if you wanted. We make about five shopping trips a week and we spend about £15 per trip. And as you can see, those things don't vary very much. They just see little peaks at Christmas when people's behaviour changes a little in run-up to celebrations. And then you get into 2020 and everything gets thrown out of the window. Suddenly trip spend shoots up and frequency drops way below where it has been historically. And that's a direct reaction to people feeling less comfortable in stores and therefore wanting to get everything that they can in a fewer shopping trips so they have to make less trips out and spend less time in physical retail. And under surface of that you can see the evolution in the size of trips that people are making. So obviously the amount that people are spending on what we would call out-of-home trips and what I mean by that is people buying and consuming things either in food service and hospitality or on the go. You can see the decline there which is inevitable given the amount of closures we've seen. But also within take-home purchasing shrinking in those smaller trips where people are spending less than £20 and a more than 50% growth in trips where people are spending more £60, which is again is a reflection of that desire to get everything that you can in one trip and get in and get out and not have to spend as much time in stores. And that in turn follows to where we end up shopping. So here we split food and beverage purchasing into channels and the year-on-year performance into take-home purchasing and out-of-home purchasing. So the channels that are more dependent on out-of-home purchasing, i.e. food service and the high street are the ones that have suffered. Those channels that are more dependent on take-home purchasing are the ones that have benefited. Specifically the internet or e-commerce which is up 58% year-on-year. Convenience and discounts is up by a smaller amount and it's kind of interesting to see on this chart that supermarkets is the slowest growing channel within take-home. And the reason for that is that so much of the benefit that e-commerce has derived has come directly out of supermarkets because grocery e-commerce is so good at catering for large trolley trips that people would normally have done in a supermarket. So if people have taken those trips online, it's the supermarkets that have suffered most directly. And if we look at that channel evolution over times here again right back to the 29th of March, on a weekly basis we're looking at the year-on-year changing share for each of our channels. You see right back in March just after the first lockdown there was a big uplift in people using convenience stores and that's the yellow area there but that quickly ebbed the way and the blue area replaced it which is online or e-commerce or internet, whichever language you want to use to describe it. And that is the change that's remained resolute and remains that share growth remains in place right up to the end of November in the most recent lockdown. The other thing that you can see on the chart is the direct impact that has on supermarket share. So the direct transition from one channel to the other so that sort of lighter blue colour is negative throughout and almost mirrors the e-commerce gains. So to put some of that e-commerce gain into context it's been a subject that's been talked about a huge amount this year, just a couple of stats on that. So one is that we've seen a decade's worth of gains in six months just to put it into context. So in 2008 e-commerce had a 3% share of grocery it took 12 years to get to 8% at the start of this year and by the middle of this year it already risen to 13%. So these are historic changes but we do need to keep in mind we're talking about 13% of the market not 50% to the market. So it's still a small part of the market relatively but absolutely the fastest growing. And what that means for marketers and brands is that people are shopping differently and the path to purchase has been shortened if you like. So either I'm going online and I'm being directed to my favourites and being encouraged to purchase the things I've purchased before. Or if I am going to store, when we ask people what's your experience like and how many products are you considering we found that in an equivalent survey ran in the middle of this year versus one ran in 2019 in more inverted commerce normal times people told us they were considering 40% less products and this goes back to the idea that I'm less comfortable in the environment, I don't want to spend time hanging around at the shelf I'm more likely to default to buying the first thing that catches my eye putting in my trolley and moving on. And therefore the implication for marketers is the need to get your product front of mind before people walk through the door of the store is that much greater because the opportunity to interrupt people either when they're doing physical shopping trips like this or when the shopping online is greatly reduced on where it was historically. And one final point on shopping before we move on is to the out of home channels I've talked a lot about grocery and take home but the biggest disruption has been out of home or hospitality and here we're looking at the year on year change in number of trips to different parts of that out of home universe. So a few things to draw your attention to here the first is the sort of light blue line which goes above the axes and actually goes into quite significant growth the only bit of this channel that's really benefited which is delivery so we've seen big growth in that because obviously it better fits the way in which people have been living their lives. The other thing to draw your attention to which I think is indicative or gives us some glimpse of the future is the yellow line which is full service restaurants and the fact that it almost got back to 2019 levels during the Eat Out to Help Out scheme that ran through August which to me says there is a latent demand for people to get out into restaurants and experience that kind of real out of home hospitality experience that they can't get in the home and as soon as they become more comfortable in that environment and even in the middle of the pandemic we almost saw people return to normal as soon as they're incentivised to do so. So I would expect that type of out of home experience to recover pretty quickly once people become comfortable with it. Where the greater challenges is that real on the go experience. So here I think that's best represented by the retail line and what we mean by that are people nipping into a store by something to consume while they're travelling or while they're on the go. That hasn't come anywhere near back to recovering and that's a reflection of the fact that people are spending less time on the go, people are travelling to work less, people are travelling everywhere less and therefore people are spending less time on the go and that part of the out of home industry I think is going to struggle more to recover to its historic levels than the sort of more leisure based out of home which people are anxious to get back to as soon as they feel comfortable doing so. So to summarise where we think channels will end up and how we think shopping will evolve in 2021. Quite a lot of colours on this chart and they're going to go through everything that's in here but we're basically saying for each channel that the future will be a combination of what was their pre-COVID momentum so what's their long term historical momentum. What's been the Covid impact on that channel and what's the recession reappear so we're expecting a recessionary environment in 2021 what impact do we expect that to have on each channel and that allows us to build a sort of composite outlook for each of those channels so for supermarkets we think it's a challenging future because they were already struggling and by supermarkets they were larger format stores they were already losing share and the acceleration in online has really hurt them as we've seen and we think discounters will continue to take share from them so a struggle in terms of maintaining share we should bear in mind all the time that is far the biggest channel as well. In convenience we did see that short bounce in convenience sales immediately after the first lockdown as I referred to but that quickly ebbed away and as we move into a recessionary environment the need to save doesn't lend itself to shopping in convenience because typically prices are higher comparable to other larger format stores so I think on balance we expect convenience to remain relatively flat. Ecom I've referred to I think we should absolutely expect Ecom to hold on to many of the gains that it's made retail has invested in it, consumers have become more open to it. Discounters we expect to recover we're moving into a recessionary environment placed perfectly to their value proposition and there's still aggressive store opening plans for many discounts so we expect them to recover after what hasn't been a brilliant 2020 as people haven't really treated those stores as somewhere that can fulfil that need to get everything I need in a single trip. High Street it's pretty clear that there's a challenging environment so lots of closures in non food and drink stores on those locations which is likely to affect footfall and is like therefore likely to affect food and drink outlets in that world and then finally out of home as we finished with I think there's a mixed picture so pure sort of leisure enjoyment out of home full service restaurants etc I think we'll recover quite quickly I think it's going to be much harder for that pure on the go type consumption which is just not fitting in with the way we've suffered because the way people's lives have changed. So that's shopping differently and selecting differently I think three things to remember there big people are making bigger trips but fewer trips e-commerce has been the big beneficiary so far but we expect this counters to bounce back in 2021 and remember for marketers there's fewer opportunities to interrupt the path to purchase because of the way people have changed their behaviour. So from shoppers to brands and now I'm going to talk about some of the best forming brands through 2020 and any of the lessons we can learn from them to take things forward. We measure thousands of brands through the panels I described earlier so what I've done here is select a sample of brands that have over performed versus their category in 2020 and these are all big brands because we've selected brands that are in the top 100 grocery brands in the last year. I'm just going to look at a few themes that we think are common to them under these headings so circumstance strategy and tactics and just see if there's any common themes or learnings we can take from them. So the first one is with regards to circumstance and there's the list of our 10 brands and there's two things we're testing them for basically. Were they already growing in 2019 and therefore did they benefit from carrying pre-existing momentum and you can see there's an even mix so some were already growing stronger in 2019 somewhere but it's clearly not a determining factor because some have turned around some have continued existing momentum. What is much more consistent is the bottom row where we have a list of brands here that are all leaders in areas or categories that have seen a boost in demand as a result of the pandemic and the changing people's lives through 2020 so Dettel being a perfect example of a lead brand in antibacterial cleaners and a huge surge in demand for those products through this year clearly drives sales to a brand and there's various other examples of that and what this says to me is that it reiterates the power and branding of owning something in a category and owning a choice factor in a category because as people enter those categories and start buying them for the first time they will default to what appears to be the natural choice and the most common choice and these brands have all benefited from that. There's also a question of channel so I talked in the last section a lot about which retailers have done well and which retail channels have done well so what we looked at for these 10 brands is the contribution to their growth of those different channels that I was referring to and what I draw your attention to here is the sort of empty black line which is on the left hand side of each of the blocks which is the average for groceries so the average contribution to growth across total grocery for supermarkets was about 27% for the internet was about 38% and then we can compare each of our brands to that and draw a couple of conclusions. The primary one is that 9 out of the 10 of our brands were disproportionately reliant on supermarkets and performing disproportionately well in supermarkets which says to us that although some of the fastest growth is coming elsewhere, winning where the scale is should always be the primary priority. But then as we look at a couple of examples we can see for example that Creighton there have performed inconvenience and the finish over performed in online. When we dig under the surface of that I'm not going to show any data on it but you can see that Creighton there has really had a concerted push into convenience channels and benefited from some supply issues for some competitors whereas Finish has had a very concerted effort for a number of years on really driving the prominence for the brand on Econ sites and you'll see it if you google or if you search for wash of tablets on tesco.com or asda.com you'll invariably see some Finish related activity. So there is scope for subtle variations in strategy and individual channels but the primary message here is get it right where the scale is and that will tend to deliver the success. Actually we looked at marketing activity behind these brands to see if they've done anything special this year that specifically referenced the changing circumstance that we've seen through 2020 and only two of the ten have really noticeable activity that's clearly been designed in response to the pandemic so Dettol lots of advertising on the underground in London and indeed placing those hand sanitising units in lots of tube stations for free and McCain had a campaign which talked about family and very perhaps not quite so overly but certainly referenced the fact that people have been driven apart by the pandemic. I think the reason this is not to say these things necessarily drove the growth because it's kind of saying that these things are unusual in our top ten and actually I think that's because you can't you can't change the equity of the brand in such a short space of time and really the sort of tactical movements and the pre-existing equity of the brands is a stronger force in what we've seen over the last year and then finally just a question on tactics so what how these brands have evolved and four of them have seen a fundamental change in what the biggest sewing skew is so for forever for as long as we can remember a two litre bottle of Coke Zero has been the primary format through which it's been sold a single can of Napolina has been the primary format through which it's been sold and that sort of standard bag of McCain has been the standard that the primary way in which it's been sold and for all of those brands that's changed and there is a certain amount of agility and particularly in supply that has benefited these brands because they've been able to not necessarily produce new formats but adjust the balance of what they're producing and what they're putting on shelves to better fit the needs because essentially as people are spending more time at home they're more interested in buying into larger packs and therefore we see a disproportionate movement of those kind of formats and one final point which is what happens when we look beyond those top 100 brands and I'm not going to go through all of these but I think it's really interesting to see when we look at the top 500 brands the second fastest growing of them is Corona which says to us that once and for all that no publicity is bad publicity so what have we learned about brands before I move on to the final section that looks ahead to 2021 I think prioritise the scale opportunities first as we saw with supermarkets deflexible in your approach to other channels because there are specific wins that you can make there if you get it right be prepared to respond quickly to change in demand specifically in terms of pack sizes and what you can offer try and own a key choice driver in your category because as I said when new consumers on new demand comes into the category it will tend to default to whoever is owning that choice factor and then finally as we saw with Corona on that last side I think we've got once and for all we've got proof that all publicity is good publicity so finally I'm going to talk through a few themes that we think are going to remain prevalent in 2021 and these are themes that we think are prevalent both for the consumer and for the retail customer there's four of them, the first of them is value so actually starting with the consumer confidence slides again this isn't can't our data but it's the long term view of UK consumer confidence and the point I wanted to make here is that when we look back to 2008-2009 and the dipping consumers confidence that we saw through the recession it lasted far far longer than the official recession so I think the message here is that people's minds and outlook recover much more slowly than potentially the numbers and the economy and we've seen that dipping consumer confidence again this year and we should expect to see some of the changes in the way people are thinking to last a lot longer than the next 12 18 months and when we look back at that period from 2007 in this case 2007-2015 which is that period of suppressed consumer confidence we can look at the behavioural differences that we saw in the way people are shopping and draw some conclusions about what we might see in the future so what we look at here is cumulatively over that period from 2007-2015 the average household spent 22% more on groceries but over the same periods the cumulative inflation was 36% so what that says to us is that in some way people were finding a way to manage their spend so that they could mitigate some of that inflation because if they'd just been buying exactly the same product their spend would also have gone up by 36% and then we can break that down and say did they buy more or less volume not really they bought about the same stuff did they shop in cheaper stores a little bit but not dramatically what they did was make lots of micro choices at shelf where they looked for little savings so little savings in terms of trying to buy more in promotion and little savings in terms of trying to choose cheaper products so that could be buying a private label product instead of a brand or a budget private label product instead of a standard private label product so the emphasis on value is likely to increase and your ability to articulate the value of your product as we go into 2021 will become more and more important both to the consumer but also to the retail customers who are determined to put their own value proposition to shoppers and therefore they're looking for brands who articulate their value proposition well as well but that isn't to say that next year is all about being cheap and offering the cheapest products that you can because what we also see in a recession what we've seen this year and what we saw back in 2008-2009 is that people are looking for premium mix for experiences that they can take from out of home in home so the point of comparison for whether your product is offering good value or not isn't always whether it's the cheapest product on shelf it may be that it's a good replacement for an experience that someone might have had in a restaurant so this year we've seen some out of home brands moving into retail we've got TGI Friday's range in Iceland, we've got Premonjay coffee being sold on Amazon and moving out of the food and drink world we've got big growth in things like facial masks and in-home hair colouring so experiences that people would have had in salons but they're taking back into home and if we look back at 2008 one of the strongest performing categories was sort of premium ground coffee which is expensive relative to instant coffee but actually quite a saving relative to being out in a coffee shop and paying for a product on the go so it's not to say it's all about being the cheapest but it's about framing your value in the right way for consumers who are going to be more conscious of that the next thing I want to talk about is health so something that's been on the agenda for a while but we would typically characterise something like health as something that gets deprioritised in a crisis specifically an economic crisis because people become more concerned about the immediate situation and less concerned about the medium term situation of how healthy they are and this is some data from our usage panels again where we're looking at what proportion of products that people are consuming are they telling us they're consuming for health reasons and we did see in April and May a noticeable drop off in the amount of people who are on the amount of occasions at which people were calling out health reasons but as we move through into July and we can continue this up to the present day we haven't seen that so we've seen a drop back to normal and indeed slightly higher than normal in terms of the amount of occasions for health reasons so the conclusion here is we expect health to remain robust and a strong force in people's choice going forward and not become suppressed in the same way it has in previous economic crises and a couple of reasons for that one is we're seeing it more broadly than food and drinks so sales of vitamins, minerals and supplements are up 18% which is double the rate of the broader healthcare category and I could have chosen lots of examples of this but as an example Peloton which is a home exercise equipment brand sales up 172% year on year so people are conscious of health people are thinking about their health because this isn't just an economic crisis so a global health pandemic and those things are likely to stay top of people's minds not just because they want them to but also because the government wants them to so the government are talking about new regulations with regard to HFSS products in 2021 which may mean a removal of promotions, may mean a removal of online advertising and those kind of government communications both in the sense of what they do in store but also the news headlines they create tend to influence the public health sector so two more to go so we've talked about value, we've talked about health another one which we put in a similar bucket to health is sustainability so again you might have anticipated that as people become focused on them now the broader future and the broader issues of sustainability become less important to them but we've run a study in each of the last two years where we've asked people across the globe about their attitudes to sustainability and basically we classify from eco-actives who are people who care a state that they care very strongly about sustainable issues and they're willing to do something about them through to eco-dismissers who are basically the opposite saying I'm not really that bothered and I'm not really going to do anything about it but the most interesting thing here is we've seen the dismissers group shrink year on year and we've seen both the actives and the considerers group grow year on year so we're seeing these ideas still being top of people's minds and what hasn't changed is that the humour is still putting those issues at the door of the manufacturer of the product so when we asked people in 2019 who's primarily responsible for issues relating to plastic waste and in 2020 who's primarily responsible for issues relating to limiting economic damage in both cases about 4 out of 10 people have told us that it's primarily the manufacturer that I think is responsible for solving that issue and you can see the breakdown so it's manufacturers followed by government followed by consumers and followed by retailers and importantly at the moment when you ask those same consumers can you name a brand who's doing a good job on that front only around one in five are managing to do so which might be seen as a damning statistic but can also be seen as an opportunity for brands which says there aren't really many brands who are leading the way in consumers minds on this front so if you can get cut through with your sustainability message there's a lot of headroom there and a lot of opportunity there in terms of all of the range of issues that sit under the umbrella of sustainability it's packaging that's top of these people's agendas and that's because it's the most visible thing for people it's the thing that they take home it's the thing that fills up their bins it's the thing that they throw out so if you are going to communicate something relating to sustainability packaging is the issue which has the most cut through with consumers both in the UK and across most of the world and very finally the last in a lot of data charts is innovation so the fourth of my fourth thing so we've talked about value we've talked about health we've talked about sustainability and now innovation and the reason I wanted to talk very briefly about that is that we've seen less innovation for a variety of reasons in 2020 so you can see here this is the percentage of sales from new products across each of the leading retailers and you see it's dropped universally either because they've been less keen to list innovation or because manufacturers have not been investing as heavily behind it but what this means is that there's both a lot of headroom and appetite for innovation from consumers as we go forward into next year and there's going to be a need for it because as we anniversary those big highs in take home sales last year bringing new and used categories is going to be absolutely essential if we're going to have any hope of matching some of those sales we've seen through 2020 so four things to remember I think as we go into 2021 value scrutiny will rise health and sustainability still riding high in people's and consumer priorities and there is an innovation gap to fill which should be seen as a window of opportunity so loads of content in the last half an hour hopefully you've stayed with me through all of that I think if nothing else just wanted to leave you with four questions that I think you should be asking of your strategy as you go into 2021 the first of those is how have you responded to the needs and how consumers have changed and do you understand how needs have changed in your category have you responded to how shopping demand has changed either in the way we're shopping or where we're shopping have you got choice factors in your category that you own so as demand shifts you can benefit from that and are you well placed to capitalise on those key four priorities that both consumers and customers will be demanding of brands in 2021 thank you very much I'll pause there because I know we've got time for Q&A but thanks for your time this afternoon we're now going to have a short 10 minute Q&A session and our first question we've got quite a few on brands we'll start off many smaller food brands were dropped or allowed to go out of stock in favour of major brands in the early part of the crisis have they now recovered or got back on the shelves and recovered sales yes so we we did quite a lot of work through the spring looking at what was very clearly a peak in sales for number one brands and leading brands which has been characterised a combination of retailer action which was to sort of simplify and streamline operations as the question implies but also customers perhaps reaching for what they might consider to be trusted brands or the most common choice when they go into the shelf but that affected largely disappeared by the time we got into the summer and I think if you are a smaller brand you should play to that idea that I talked about right at the beginning around people seeking more variety in their lives so when we look at the evolution of need states people looking for treats people looking for variety because there's a real I think people might have hunkered down in April and May but by July August September they were back looking for variety and they were fed up of being the same thing all the time so yes we've definitely seen the recovery and I think there's every reason to expect that to continue okay thanks so looking at trends as well you mentioned in the presentation about discounters and how they were doing less well than the high street of the supermarkets some commented that it's they were quite late to the online market but they're still building stores across the UK so looking forwards do you see them maintaining their previous strong momentum with this year just being a bump in the road? Yeah our view is that the reduction in demand or the slowing of growth of discounters reflected the fact that people wanted to shop differently and people wanted to make those big 60 100 pound shops where they could get everything that they need and for many people the more limited range that a discounter offers wasn't the wasn't the first choice to fulfil that need and therefore people would be less people were choosing discounters that effect again has reduced slightly over time and they're not suffering the share losses they were at the beginning of the pandemic and as we move into 2021 as I've referred to towards the end there we're expecting value in the hump for value to become a stronger force for consumers so I think there's every reason to expect a bounce back and return some of the momentum they've seen in the longer term we're also seeing Aldi dipping their toe in the click and collect markets I know it's only in certain parts of the country at the moment but there's every indication that we'll see more online activity certainly from Aldi and if Aldi make a success of it then you'd expect little in the longer term as well so if we're all looking for treats at the moment there's a question about artisan and local producers and that sector had come into its own recently do you have any inkling what the future trajectory might be for those sorts of businesses going forward it's a difficult one because I think in that that initial peaking convenience purchasing also coincided with a peaking use of butchers and greengrocers and fishmongers and those sort of things I think it's one of those where society will be a bit divided because typically you're asked to spend more for those products or shopping that way and some people will be willing and able to do that and some people who have come out or will come out of the recession better off than when they went in will be very comfortable shopping in that way we've also got bear in mind there's a lot of people who are moving in the other direction in terms of their economic means and for those kind of people it's going to be difficult for them to continue or start shopping locally and start buying more premium brands and artisan brands so I think it's a mixture I think there's a lot of opportunity there but we need to be conscious it's probably in one section of society We've got a question as well about which is good one about when we're all cooking at home at the moment about the huge meal delivery companies what impact that might have on supermarkets and their position as a force in the food chain Yeah I think we've definitely seen growth in that kind of activity so both delivery in the sort of classic takeaway sense and sort of meal kits and things as you refer to there I think at the moment it's still very small so in terms of its impact on the scale of the things that we're talking about here it's pretty small it's not a common behaviour it's a growing but niche behaviour so I don't think it's a trend that the supermarkets will be overly concerned with as things stand today Have you been able to identify any differences across the UK and people's behaviour whether it's small village versus city or different regional locations any local trends So one of the things we've looked at and this is more a function of government regulation than the things you described there but where the nature of the lockdown rules has a huge impact so for example in Wales recently where we had the firebreak lockdown we saw a massive increase in e-commerce usage because people were forced to behave in that way The other thing we've seen and I'm racking my brains a little bit for the detail because it was a while ago we looked at it but in the e-commerce rise and growth was more concentrated or is more concentrated in urban areas than it is in rural areas presumably because the people's access to it and people's faith in the delivery and the ability to be delivered is greater but the biggest regional differences that followed the impact of the pandemic and the associated government regulations Of course and this is an interesting question as well about local produce versus international brands and has there been any change in consumption on those with imports during the pandemic and what's likely to happen in the future in 2021 and there I use the B word. Have you any inkling what might happen? So far be it from me to predict what's going to happen with Brexit but I think there's a couple of things one at the moment it's not something that's high in consumers minds because although it's starting to hit the news more and more certainly up until the last couple of weeks everything associated with the pandemic has been much more top of mind than anything to do with Brexit although that seems to be changing in the last couple of weeks I think that the most likely impact is pricing and we've heard Tesco talk provide some warnings on that on certain products and that really just exacerbates some of that value message that I was talking about because if you've got the double whammy if people's disposable income being reduced and prices on certain items being pushed up then it puts pressure right across people's budgets when they're shopping so I think the primary impact is more an exacerbation of what I was referring to in terms of people choosing local produce versus choosing internationally imported products we've not seen any evidence of change in that at the moment I don't think I'm in a position to predict how that plays out You had some slides earlier on in the presentation about different generational trends have you been able to identify any generational food shopping trends for example for generation Z consumers compared to older customers or consumers There are certainly differences in terms of the types of categories that have been prioritised I referred to it in the presentation but the sort of impact of health and hygiene products is that much greater in the older generations presumably or I think we know because the concerns associated with the pandemic are that much greater so there's a great revolution in the purchasing in that direction for older consumers indeed there's been a greater growth in the use of online shopping amongst older consumers than it has amongst younger consumers again reflecting a greater concern amongst those groups Beyond that I'm not sure I've seen anything at a category level that says the choices that people are making are wildly different it's more that people are choosing to shop in a different way based on the extent to which their lives and their concerns have been affected by the pandemic The next question could be a post Brexit one as well when we're looking at importing from different sources someone's wanting to know about the prognosis for consumer demand for food products predicated on high animal welfare standards including free range or organic. Do you see any trends in that direction? I don't have any specific evidence on that one so I'm not I don't have a clear answer on that one to be honest and I think we've got time for one final question as the recession deepens would sustainability issues become less relevant to prioritising prices? I think maybe if we're asking people to pay a premium for products with sustainable credentials but I also and actually I'll go back to that slide I showed when we ran the survey this year I personally was expecting that we'd see people responding to the survey and saying I'm less concerned about these things because I'm more concerned about my immediate health and the well-being of my family but we haven't seen that and I think because people were two things one because during lockdown we saw what the world looked like when there weren't aeroplanes flying everywhere and there weren't as many people driving around that opened people's eyes a little and second is when we spend more time at home we see all of our bins and recycling and whatever else fill up that much more quickly I think people have become more conscious of those issues rather than less so I think that the strength of concern and therefore the strength of that as an influence on what people are buying and choosing will remain. Okay, that's brilliant, thanks Andrew some very good questions there as well from our listeners. So that's all the time we have for in our Q&A session today I'd like to say thank you to Andrew for today's presentation the CIM food drinking agriculture group for organising the event and thank you to everyone for attending we hope you found it interesting and worthwhile Our next webinar express will be leading through turnaround and transformation on Tuesday the 26th of January at 1pm which will be hosted by CIM South West. You'll find it listed on the events page on the CIM website where you'll be able to find out more information and to register for the session. Once again you'll shortly be receiving a survey on today's event and we'd really appreciate that if you could provide your feedback. So on behalf of CIM thank you for joining us and we hope you enjoy the rest of your day