Brits will have to fork out more for their Christmas dinner this year as the cost of living crisis bites as supermarket shopping is around 14 per cent more expensive now than it was last year.
Grocery price inflation means that the cost of a traditional Christmas dinner for four people will this year cost around £31 on average, according to data from Kantar. That's up by almost 10 per cent compared to last year.
Shoppers will have to spend an extra £60 in December to buy the same items as last year, the research shows. It also reveals that sales of mince pies and Christmas puddings are down year-on-year, suggesting that consumers are leaving their seasonal purchases until later in the year to try and manage budgets in the run-up to Christmas Day.
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However, Fraser McKevitt, head of retail and consumer insight at Kantar, said there are signs that inflation may now be easing. He said: “As we move into the busiest time of the year for supermarkets, there are signs that the pace of grocery price inflation is easing off slightly as we saw a small dip of 0.1 percentage points this month – the first drop in 21 months."
He added: “Grocery inflation still has a long way to come down though and based on the current rate, shoppers will have to spend an extra £60 in December to buy the same items as last year. The cost of a traditional Christmas dinner for four has hit £31 in 2022, an example of just how much rising prices are impacting people at the tills and in their daily lives.”
Analysis by the TUC shows that the cost of food for a Christmas dinner has increased three times faster than wages this year. The data suggested Christmas dinner items such as turkey, pigs in blankets, carrots and roast potatoes rose by an average of 18 per cent, while wages rose by 5.7 per cent. The cost of cranberry sauce and bread sauce has risen by a third, according to the analysis.
Meanwhile, Kantar’s data shows that discount supermarkets have continued to grow over the latest 12 weeks. Both Aldi and Lidl have opened new stores across Britain.
Lidl’s year-on-year sales increased by 22 per cent, pushing its market share to a record 7.4 per cent, while an additional 1.5 million households shopped with Aldi compared with last year as it increased sales by 24.4 per cent to claim 9.3 per cent of the market.
Kantar said the coming month was on course to be the biggest ever for take-home grocery sales due to the combination of inflation and festive spending. Mr McKevitt said: “December looks set to be a record-breaking month with sales going above the £12 billion mark for the first time. We’re expecting Friday 23 December to be the busiest day for pre-Christmas shopping.
It comes after shoppers were warned over a shortage of turkeys this year. Half of the free range turkeys produced for Christmas in the UK have already been killed in the bird flu epidemic, British Poultry Council chief executive Richard Griffiths told the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee last week.
Mr Griffiths said: “The usual amount of free range birds grown for Christmas is around 1.2 to 1.3 million. We have seen around 600,000 of those free range birds being directly affected.” Total UK turkey production for Christmas was around 8.5 to 9 million birds, but around a million had been culled or died from bird flu, he said.
Asked what that might mean for prices this Christmas, Mr Griffiths said “I don’t know. That’s really a question for retailers. We don’t know how the gaps within retail are going to be filled at this point.”
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