Shoppers spent almost €2.48bn on groceries in the past 12 weeks bringing the amount spent in supermarkets in Ireland this year to €8.97bn, as the big Christmas household spending season draws closer.
The figures come from Kantar Worldpanel in Ireland, which tracks 30,000 grocery products bought by 5,000 households.
It means that shoppers spent 2.8% more in the latest period and spent around 2.75% more in the year to date compared with 2017, at a time when grocery price inflation edged only slightly higher, by 0.2%.
Once again, the top five supermarkets took 89% of all the spending on groceries, leaving a market worth around an annual €1bn to be fought over by other grocers.
With a share of 22.4% of the €2.48bn, Dunnes secured the top slot as the largest grocer in the latest 12 weeks of the regular surveys.
At 21.4%, SuperValu edged out Tesco by the smallest of margins for second place.
And following a growth spurt, Aldi caught up with its rival German discounter, Lidl to tie for fourth measured by market share of the €2.48bn spent in the 12 weeks.
Kantar said shoppers in Ireland spent €64.5m on groceries in the North in the past 52 weeks.
That’s up only slightly from the €64m spent in the same period a year earlier and accounts for only a small fraction of the billions spent on groceries in Ireland.
And shoppers have been lured North following the 16% slump in the value of sterling against the euro since the UK voted in the summer of 2016 to exit the EU.
Shoppers from Ireland had spent around €41.2m in the North’s supermarkets in the comparable period two years ago.
