Supermarket price wars don’t extend to snack foods: survey

A recent survey conducted by Canstar Blue and Colmar Brunton has shown that despite the supermarket price wars, consumers generally prefer premium brands to generic alternatives when it comes to snack foods, regardless of the price.

The first Canstar Blue Taste Awards showed that over half of the participants opted for taste over price when purchasing cheese, yoghurt, frozen vegetables and pies, ice-cream, bread, instant coffee, potato chips, margarine and cracker biscuits.

“The findings show most consumers simply won’t compromise on taste when it comes to snack foods, which suggests the savage price cuts between the major supermarkets impacting milk, fresh fruit and vegetables are unlikely to extend to the snack food market, which is good news for manufacturers,” said Rebecca Logan, Manager of Canstar Blue, in a media release.

Challenger brands seemed to be popular, with participants preferring challenger brands to market leaders. Mainland won out over Bega in the cheese category and Gippsland Dairy beat Yoplait for yoghurt. Aldi proved to be very popular, beating Birds Eye in the frozen vegetables category and both Sargents and Big Ben for frozen pies.

Moccona bucked the trend, however, with the market leader being selected as the favoured instant coffee brand.

In addition, instant coffee consumers appeared to have the strongest brand loyalty, with 68% of consumers always purchasing the same instant coffee brand. In comparison, only 33% of consumers purchasing bread had a loyalty to a particular brand.