Premium supermarket chain Booths, based in the North of England, has had a successful Christmas, posting a 3.3% increase in sales in the three weeks between 15 December and 5 January.
Commenting on its performance, chief executive Edwin Booth said that the retailer performed "very well in a highly competitive market over Christmas. We focused on offering the very best traditional Christmas food and drink with flair and purpose."
The retailer enjoyed a particularly strong performance from its private label range, with double digit sales growth recorded across its own-brand smoked salmon (+25%), gammon (+25%), prosecco (+50%) and low-alcohol wine (+35%).
"Customers trust Booths for quality, service, knowledge and our commitment to find the very best suppliers," Edwin Booth added.
Analyst Viewpoint
Commenting on the retailer's performance, Thomas Brereton, retail analyst at GlobalData said, "Following two successive years of losses (ending March 2018), this turnaround indicates that Booths has grasped the price-control benefits of having an own-brand proposition.
"While we have seen this same tactic being used across the major grocers, for a smaller supermarket (Booths has 28 stores) to also achieve this deserves commendation. In a similar vein to Morrisons and Tesco, Booths has grown its B2B sales (more than doubling), in the hopes of likewise creating a robust wholesale proposition that can safeguard against unwanted volatility in the retail arm of the business."
Brereton noted that while these results are a "step in the right direction" for the retailer, analysts will need to wait a while to discover what impact they will have on Booths' full-year results, which are due in late 2019.
"In the meantime, Booths needs to quickly get out of “Christmas mode” and do its upmost to retain new customers that switched for festive shopping; this means keeping a close eye on any move into the premium sphere by local competitors such as Morrisons," he said.
© 2019 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Stephen Wynne-Jones. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: European Supermarket Magazine.
