Hospitality sales grew 8.7% year-on-year in the latest 12 weeks, “headline year-on-year inflation appears to be softening”

Hospitality sales grew 8.7% year-on-year in the latest 12 weeks, according to analysis from HDI, the leading provider of card spending insight and pricing data to the UK hospitality sector.

Fast food & takeaway, coffee & sandwich and pizza delivery continued to be the best performing sectors in the 12 weeks ending 8 August 2023.  Branded Pub Restaurants were the best performer in the pub sector, whilst Casual Dining continued to see the lowest levels of year-on-year growth, according to analysis of HDI’s panel of 10.2 million unique customers.

Mark Bentley, business development director at HDI, said: “The hospitality sector is seeing relatively stable performance now, with the pattern of sectors enjoying the strongest and lowest levels of growth being reasonably predictable month to month.  The changes to Alcohol Duty from 1 August, including 2 new reliefs for small producers and products sold on draught, are something that we’ve been watching closely.

“There’s been a variety of different responses to these changes; some operators have taken price increases on packaged beer & cider and spirits in line with duty changes, whereas other operators haven’t yet moved their prices. Headline year-on-year inflation appears to be softening, with average prices now up 10.0% on food and 7.4% on drinks from our tracking of more than 165,000 like-for-like site/item combinations in pubs & bars.”

HDI’s panel tracks more than 160,000 individually identifiable hospitality venues across 350 different brands and formats, with the customer spend analysis providing unique insight into how the cost-of-living crisis is impacting hospitality.