Northern Ireland Take Home Food and Drink Purchases 2018 to 2022

Background

The Food Standards Agency in Northern Ireland has a remit for dietary health surveillance which provides a comprehensive understanding of what Northern Ireland consumers are eating and purchasing as well as their attitudes and behaviours with regards to food. This data is important in creating an evidence base that informs policy development, implementation and evaluation.   

The monitoring of take home food and drink purchases in Northern Ireland forms one part of the FSA’s dietary health surveillance. This means all food and drink that is purchased and brought into the home excluding takeaways delivered to the home and food ordered at restaurants. The FSA in Northern Ireland commissioned Kantar’s Worldpanel to provide the purchasing data detailed within this report. Kantar is an international company dealing in consumer knowledge and insights based on continuous consumer panels.   

Research Approach

For this research, 650 households were chosen by Kantar Worldpanel to reflect the Northern Ireland households population by region and demographics. For some aspects of the data, weighting is applied to ensure the panel is reflective of the Northern Ireland population and their purchasing habits.

Kantar’s Worldpanel aims to collect data on all food and drink purchases brought into the home. In each household, a ‘main shopper’ is designated and defined as the person who is mainly responsible for grocery shopping in each household. Panellists are provided with a handheld scanner to scan purchases once brought into the home. Panellists scan the barcodes of purchased items alongside their shopping receipt, which collects the product prices. Using a codebook provided, panellists scan unbarcoded products such as loose breads, fruit, and vegetables.

The FSA in Northern Ireland commissioned Kantar’s Worldpanel to provide data for take home food and drink purchasing on 38 categories from 2018 to 2022. The FSA in Northern Ireland purchased a set of data as detailed in the methodology.
The FSA created a categorisation system to prompt Kantar Worldpanel to create three additional categories: Healthier, high in fat, sugar or salt (HFSS) and other (excluded categories or those unable to be classified). In addition, Kantar’s Worldpanel have used their market knowledge to provide wider contextual information to accompany the data in the commissioned report, which is therefore not always included

Key findings

• Excluding years affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, there have been no major changes in nutrient purchasing per person per day for energy (kcals), fat (g), saturated fat (g), fibre (g) and salt (g). There has been a 5g decrease in sugar purchasing per person per day from 2018 to 2022. 
• In 2022, both consumers with higher and lower incomes purchased more food and drink from HFSS categories than Healthier categories. 
• Alcohol purchasing has decreased in recent years. However, share of spend on alcohol on promotion has increased. This is potentially a result of the cost-of-living crisis. 
• There has been a widespread reduction in promotional purchasing. This is potential impact of the planned policies for restriction of the promotion of HFSS products in Great Britain. 
• Excluding alcohol categories, a number of HFSS products were top contributors to promotional purchases by volume in 2018, 2019 and 2022. 
• HFSS products on promotion account for approximately one-fifth of energy, sugar, salt and saturated fat purchasing. This indicates that promotions on HFSS food have an important role in purchasing patterns. 

Report Documents

Kantar Take Home Food and Drink purchases 2018- 2022 report presentation

Kantar Take Home Food and Drink purchases 2018- 2022 report appendices

Kantar Take Home Food and Drink purchases 2018- 2022 report infographic