The Best Food & Grocery Retailer Award!

We have recently undertaken the largest study into shoppers’ attitudes about the largest food & grocery retailers in the UK, and having seen many different rankings recently, we felt we were in a great position to offer our take on which retailers are doing what shoppers really want!

By understanding what a shopper requires from a shop across 4 key criteria (Price, Quality, Value & Range), and then crossing this with what shoppers felt that the supermarkets they use regularly do the best…and then adding a qualitative comments index from our the sample of 5000 primary household shoppers (in relation to Price, Range, Service, Value, Store, Stock & Quality), we were able to give a fully rounded view to who shoppers felt was the best all-around store.

And the overall winner was….Waitrose!

Rank	Supermarket	Quantitative index	Qualitative index	Overall Rating
1	Waitrose	94	133	227
2	Morrisons	104	121	225
3	Aldi	106	108	214
4	Lidl	104	108	212
5	Marks and Spencer	92	118	209
6	Asda	110	94	204
7	Sainsbury’s	99	102	201
8	Tesco	102	75	177
9	Iceland	102	75	177
10	Co-op	87	67	154

Although Waitrose were only ranked 8^th when it came to the quantitative index, they achieved far and away the greatest qualitative score based on comments by their shoppers, so although they didn’t rank well on Price or Value, shoppers loved the overall experienced (plus Quality & Range) which more than made up for this. This further demonstrates that price may be important to some, but the whole store experience should not be ignored.

Morrisons’ second placed ranking was also bolstered by a high qualitative score and a satisfactory quantitative ranking, whilst two discounters (Aldi & Lidl) performed well on both metrics. Asda were the top supermarket when only taking into consideration their quantitative score as shoppers felt their proposition best matched their expectations, but were slightly let down by some in-store issues on their qualitative index.

Sainsbury’s was close behind Asda, but the news is not so good for Tesco, whose shoppers had some serious issues with the brand and store, and only just headed Iceland. The Co-operative appears to be failing to win the hearts and minds of their shoppers, ranking bottom on both indexes.

For more detailed analysis on all the retailers mentioned, please see our Retailer Series of reports which are launched this week.

Craig Bradley