The Most Popular Shopping Items In The UK | Miller Food Service (2024)

The UK has a strong consumer culture with an attraction to certain brands and items. Every other year, a research firm or supermarket publishes lists of their bestselling products, and the same names tend to crop up each time.

As a retailer, stocking these items or at least a non-name brand alternative is a good idea. You know that customers are actively purchasing them, so you can pre-empt their need and offer it from your store to hopefully win sales from larger competitors.

There’s no definitive list for the most popular brands or products, each one comes from a different source. Some have tiny sample sizes, like a 2015 study by Tesco that surveyed 250 shoppers to determine the most common items on each shopping list. That list found these items to be the most common:

• Milk
• Bread
• Eggs
• Potatoes
• Bananas
• Bacon
• Butter
• Juice
• Biscuits

2015 was a long time ago, however, and new data suggests different trends. Statista, an online statistics database, looked at online grocery shopping habits to determine new trends. It shows the following in order of popularity:

1. Frozen products
2. Dry goods such as pasta and rice
3. Dairy products
4. Beverages
5. Sweets and snacks
6. Fruits and vegetables
7. Fresh meat and fish
8. Ready meals

As we said earlier in this article, there’s no conclusive study showing which items are most popular – but even these two lists help guide convenience stores around what to carry as essential stock.

From the lists above, we’d say the most important things to display on your shelves at all times are:

1. Frozen food: make customers’ lives easier with a range of frozen food such as fries, pizzas, frozen vegetables and more.
2. Dairy: always stock milk, but also consider other dairy products like yoghurts and butter.
3. Confectionary: impulse buying often centres on sweets and chocolate, so make sure you’ve got something to satisfy a customer’s sweet tooth when it strikes.
4. Fruit: bananas and other fruits are popular on every shopper’s list. Stock a healthy range of your own with Miller Food Service, where we can deliver quickly to ensure all fruit reaches your shelves as fresh as possible.
5. Ice cream: you might not see it in the lists above, but ice cream is a surging category in terms of UK shopper popularity. Take-home tubs of ice cream have grown by 22.3% YOY, making them essential to any shop with a freezer section. Stock up your own freezers and maximise customer interest today by ordering take-home tubs from our Eden Farm Hulleys brand, part of the Kitwave Group.