BWG Foods increased sales by 7% in four months to end of January

Retail brands delivered "a mixed but overall strong performance"

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BWG Foods increased its sales in Ireland by 6.9% in a roughly four-month period to the end of January, according to a trading update published by South African listed parent The Spar Group.

BWG Foods’ network here includes Spar, Eurospar, Mace, Londis, and XL stores. It also owns the Appleby Westward group that operates Spar in the southwest of England, which represents approximately 13% of BWG’s business.

The trading update stated that BWG Foods “reported a strong initial performance but the reintroduction of restrictions in November 2021 to combat the new variant of Covid-19, once again caused an increase in in-home consumption, and negatively impacted the hospitality industry for roughly half the period.”

“The retail brands delivered a mixed but overall strong performance,” the statement continued. “The Eurospar supermarket format was negatively impacted in the early part of the period with consumers switching spend towards hospitality and out-of-home entertainment, which were closed for much of the prior comparative period.”

Meanwhile, the “Appleby Westward group in South West England experienced similar consumer trends, with strong growth recorded by the wholesaler and their corporate retail division”.

Overall,  The Spar Group described BWG’s performance as “impressive”. It was 11.5% ahead of the same period two years ago, pre-pandemic.

The Spar Group posted overall sales growth of 5.8% to 45.5 billion Rand (€2.65bn) in the trading period to the end of 29 January. As well as operations in its home country and Ireland, it operates retail units in Switzerland and Poland.

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