Coronation fever is rising in Britain as families prepare to celebrate the new King Charles III. Also table. This is according to a survey conducted by market research firm NIQ, better known as NielsenIQ, which found that one in five British households plan to buy extra or special groceries for the coronation of King Charles III. The new monarch will be crowned next Saturday, May 6, in Westminster Abbey, and the festivities will run through Monday, May 8: an extended weekend that will bring families and friends together and is therefore eagerly anticipated by the food industry.

All this buzz can be seen, according to NIQ by total grocery sales in the UK: even now, or rather in the four weeks to April 22, they are up 9.7% year-on-year while store visits by shoppers are up 4.5%. At the same time, the share of online spending on consumer goods fell to 10.8% from 11.1% last month, indicating that, for the coming holidays, Brits are aiming to buy their favorite comfort items directly in stores.

Not surprisingly, the data says discounters Aldi and Lidl still prove to be the fastest-growing grocers in the 12 weeks to April 22, with sales up 23.6% and 21.6%, respectively. Sales were also up 9.7% at Tesco and Sainsbury's supermarkets, while they were up 14.5% at Marks & Spencer. To think wrong is to sin but to get right, they say: well, at the same time as the onslaught of grocery stores, food prices in the United Kingdom rose 15.7% through april, the largest increase recorded since 2005 according to the British Retail Consortium.

"As we saw during the Jubilee weekend in June 2022, shoppers celebrated with fizzy drinks and tea-time treats: so there may be a demand for similar products this year, despite shoppers wanting to save money", explains Mike Watkins, NIQ's UK manager. According to these, beers, wines and spirits are likely to be "a pull factor" for supermarkets.

NIQ found that in the week of Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee through June 4, 2022, sales in British supermarkets reached and exceeded 3 billion, a 10% increase over the previous year's average. Despite this infusion of cash that groceries and the industry revolving around the ceremony , will be able to give to Her Majesty's coffers, according to research firm Pantheon Macroeconomics, Britain's gross domestic product in May is set to fall by 0.2% on a monthly basis, with the decline due to the loss of the working day on monday, May 8 for the Coronation Day.