A total of 34.8 Million pints of draught beer and cider were sold over the key 5 festive trading days Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day and we see that sales were up +2.6% vs. 2023.
Overall draught sales across these 5 days drove £4,584 for pubs equating to 921 draught pints sold.
As is the norm, Christmas Eve proved to be the key night with sales up a not insubstantial +9% vs. ’23 led by the South East with a strong performance of +12.3% versus last year.
East Midlands (+11.5%), the South West (+11%) and Wales (+10%) also performed well ahead of the average.
As with previous years, Suburban outlets traded the best overall, up by +3.2%. City Centres were also up, but only marginally +0.3%.
Sadly, what was shaping up to be a storming Christmas for the trade was then negatively impacted by the awful weather over New Year with New Year’s Eve down -1.3% and New Year’s Day even worse with a drop of -7.1%. Edinburgh’s plans were cancelled due to the wind and rain leading to Hogmanay celebrations declining by -6.3% vs. 2023. This was echoed in the North East where volumes were down -10.6%, the North West which was down -6.6% and Yorkshire also following the trend with a decline of -5.6%.
In the days leading up to Christmas day, we see footfall was up +9.7% compared to 2023, which was largely driven by Suburban outlets rising by +11.5%. City Centres also saw an uptick of +6.2% during the run up to Christmas Day.
However, the length of average visit declined, with consumer dwell times falling to an average of 125 mins vs. 137 mins in the same week last year (-8.8%) with Suburbia driving the largest decline of -10.4%
The big category winners over the key Christmas trading days were Stout up an impressive +21.1% and World Lager +14.4%, with Craft +4.1% and Apple Cider also performing well +3.5%. On the flip side, World 4% declined by -11.9% and Core Lager dropped -10.9%. Premium Lager was also down -9.3% as well as Fruit Cider -7.4%.
We can see that the share of sales that Stout achieved on Mad Friday – a staggering 17.4% – fell back to 14.6% as Core Lager, World Beer and Ale grew back their share of sales despite declining in absolute terms. This will undoubtedly have been partly down to the heavily publicised stock shortages of the black stuff.
“We had all been hoping to see some decent results for the On Trade in the run up to Christmas and thankfully, our data demonstrates a really strong few days for draught sales. It’s just a shame that the weather limited the sales potential for the New Year” comments Alison Jordan, Chief Executive Officer of the Oxford Partnership.
