“[Shoppers say],‘I want to have a kind of eating experience at home. It’s got to be easy. I don’t want to have to be cleaning up,’ ” he said.
“How we[make] it easy to have an ‘eating out’ experience at home is valuable for a number of customers.”
The company said rising inflation was yet to have a big impact on overall group sales,though management highlighted that consumers had started changing their spending and moving many of their everyday purchases to the supermarket aisles or discount department store Big W.
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Banducci said one of the most pronounced consumer trends was the shift from red meat to white meat after a period of elevated prices for products such as steaks,with the availability of poultry a key challenge for the business as people pivoted away from meat over the past few months.
Woolworths customers are also shifting their make-up purchases to the group’s own brand,with sales of the company’s in-house cosmetics brand MCo Beauty up 50 per cent compared with last year.
Big W staged a rebound over the past six months,with sales at the budget-focused department store up 15.3 per cent to $2.7 billion,as the group moved past temporary store closures at the start of 2022.