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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Christmas Dinner – Homemade cheesecakes in; roast potatoes out

January 29, 2010

Guest blog by Jonny Steel, Marketing Insights Manager, mySupermarket.co.uk

With Christmas now behind us, it’s time to look back at how our eating habits changed during one of the most financially challenging festive seasons for years.

mySupermarket.co.uk, the grocery shopping and comparison website, not surprisingly found that “turkey” was the most searched for term in December 2009, leapfrogging all of the usual top searches like milk, eggs, bread, butter and cheese. However, interestingly, sales of turkey were down from last year, perhaps as a result of shoppers opting for cheaper alternatives. Sales of fresh turkey fell 17% and frozen turkey was down 37%. Although searches for “pork” remained unchanged, it seems that this provided a popular alternative for the main course, with sales of pork up 6%.

Elsewhere on the Christmas menu, the perfect roast potatoes were once again hotly debated by the celebrity chefs. Back in 2007 Nigella called for roasting the humble spud in goose fat. Last year she suggested rolling it in semolina. This year Michael Caine joined the debate by boasting on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs that his were the best. So what’s his secret? Soaking parboiled potatoes in olive oil before cooking. Both goose fat and semolina seem to have fallen out of favour as the nation’s favourite secret ingredients, seeing their pre-Christmas sales through mySupermarket.co.uk drop this year by 8% and 20% respectively. Olive oil sales were also slightly down, so it would appear that Michael Caine had not become a culinary trend setter either. That doesn’t mean that we ditched the spud completely, though. Maris Piper potatoes, recommended by many chefs as the ideal roasting potato, saw their sales rise by 8% while chilled ready-made roast potatoes rocketed in popularity by 79% and frozen by 32%. It would therefore seem that 2009 will be remembered as the year when we just couldn’t be bothered stressing over our roasted potatoes.

Cranberry sauce was the top search term driving traffic to recipe sites, and the customer purchasing data from mySupermarket.co.uk highlight how big cranberries really were this year. Sales of readymade cranberry sauce increased by 23% with Ocean Spray dominating the category. While sales of dried cranberries increased by 8%, it was the fresh variety that was the real winner this year, with a sales uplift of 57% on last year.

When it comes to dessert time, non-traditional treats seem to have been the flavour of the month. While Christmas pudding and mince pies remain national favourites, Nigella Lawson, Delia Smith and Gordon Ramsay were baking cheesecakes and pavlovas. As a result these desserts topped Christmas pudding in the recipe searches this year. At the same time, mySupermarket.co.uk experienced a 19% drop in sales of readymade cheesecake, presumably as a result of home chefs trying to bake one of their own instead of selecting one from the chilled aisles of the supermarket. Christmas pudding, on the other hand, saw a 12% rise on last year, suggesting that we were putting more confidence in what the supermarkets had to offer than our own creations.

There was a lot of buzz around mulled wine and cider this year, with searches for the traditional Christmas drink far outweighing champagne. Although champagne outsold mulled wine by a long way, we were certainly looking to impress our guests with some of our own home-made mulled wine. Sales of cloves and cinnamon sticks were up 13% while Chianti wine, recommended by Jamie Oliver as the best for making mulled wine, also saw sales increase by 3%.

mySupermarket.co.uk is the shopping and comparison website which guarantees you the lowest price for your groceries at Tesco, ASDA, Sainsbury’s and Ocado.

mySupermarket Insights is a real-time FMCG data solution for businesses, tracking daily prices and promotions for all groceries at the main supermarkets.

You can also follow both mySupermarket and Hitwise UK on Twitter.

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In Categories Christmas | Food | Guest posts | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | Supermarkets