NielsenIQ: Greek retail turnover continues positive trend in Q1 2023

The turnover of the organized food retail trade continues its upward trend in 2023, showing as a whole a positive trend for the first quarter of the year of +8.2% (YTD data up to April 02, 2023), compared to the corresponding last year period of time.

As the NielsenIQ report states, this trend is mainly driven by food, both fresh (+8.1%) and processed, and beverages (+8.2%), mainly due to their significant contribution to the sales of sector.

In addition, the trends are positive for the major categories of household use, as well as personal care, which grow by +12.1% and +7.6% respectively. However, what is interesting is that if we break down the overall +8.7% FMCG trend, it is clear that this growth continues to be purely inflationary, as prices increased by 12.2%, while volumes respectively, they fell by -3.5%.

The impact of inflation

In this strongly inflationary environment, the share of private label products saw a significant increase, from 23.8%, which was at the end of 2022, to 25.4%, in the market that also includes the discount channel, while at the same time the manufacturers of branded products are trying to become even more competitive by further intensifying their promotional intensity, from 66.7% at the end of last year, to 68.2%.

The regions that are ahead

Further analyzing the market across the different store types, as well as the different geographic areas, as defined by NielsenIQ, some notable findings emerge, as well:

With regard to the different types of stores, the largest growth is shown by the largest stores (over 2500 m2), at +11.5%, which may be due, among other things, to the fact that buyers choose the largest stores, in which in addition to greater variety can find more offers available, as well as more competitive prices.

At the level of geographical regions, the regions of Crete and the Peloponnese continue to show the most positive growth trends (+15.4% and +6.8% respectively), but at the same time this increase in turnover seems to be associated with stronger inflationary pressures in these areas, compared to the country as a whole.

Products

Focusing on the progress of specific product categories, paper products shows particularly high growth rates (indicative: toilet paper: +48.6%, kitchen paper +37.0%), mainly due to the very large increase in their average price.

On the contrary, categories linked to the pandemic, such as hand sanitizers (-58.2%), as well as elastic gloves (-30.1%), continue their downward trend, while the seed oils category also shows a significant a decrease in its total sales (-16.9%) as compared to the high base of 2022, due to the outbreak of the war in Ukraine and the shortages that had been observed in the market.

As a more general comment on the first quarter of 2023, we could note that in terms of the course of fast-moving consumer goods there seems to be a relative de-escalation in terms of inflationary pressure, compared to the last quarter of 2022 (+13.2% vs . 12.2%). However, if we take into account the fact that in the first quarter of 2022 the market had already started to register a price increase of +3.3% this means that the current inflationary pressure is coming to be added to an already elevated base. At the same time, the downward trend in volumes appears to be more moderate in this year’s first quarter (-3.5%) than in 2022 (-7.0%), which indicates that consumers are showing a more moderate reaction to increase in prices (decrease in price elasticity).