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Interest in recipes for Christmas classics like Christmas cake and pudding have halved
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Customers are looking for alternative Christmas recipes such as trifles, buns and pavlova
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Food Lovers strive to make every food moment count this Christmas with ‘Christmas breakfast’ recipe searches up over 400%
Waitrose reveals a significant shift in Christmas baking habits, reflected in a major rise in homebaking sales and a dwindling interest in recipes for Christmas Cake and Christmas Pudding - as customers buy in the traditional and get creative in the kitchen with alternative festive desserts.
Lizzie Haywood, Trend Innovation Manager at Waitrose, said: “Our food loving customers are embracing the joy of homebaking this Christmas, with sales up 22%. What's truly exciting is the creativity we're seeing, taking traditional flavours and ingredients and reshaping those for a more modern spin on a Christmas dessert. We’re also seeing new traditions emerge, with searches for Christmas breakfast recipes up over 400%, proving that our customers strive to make every food moment over the festive season count.”
The homebaking boom
The trend towards making treats at home continues to gain momentum, with overall homebaking sales up 22% year on year.
Key categories driving this growth include:
Seasonal Cake Cases: +33%
Waitrose Christmas Ready Rolled Icing: +21%
Cake covering sales: +18%
Dried fruit and nuts: +17%
A shift from traditional
Recipe searches on Waitrose.com indicate a growing appetite for non-traditional festive treats, while interest in recipes for Christmas classics like Christmas cake and pudding have halved.
Searches for alternative desserts show big increases:
‘Christmas Trifle’ searches: +403%
‘Christmas Pavlova’ searches: +244%
‘Alternative Christmas Pudding Recipes’ searches: +82%
‘Christmas Dessert Recipes’ searches: +208%
‘Sticky Cardamom Christmas Bun’ searches: +26%
The Rise of Christmas Breakfast
New traditions are emerging, particularly around Christmas morning with searches for ‘Christmas Breakfast Recipes’ soaring 483% YoY.
Some highlights of what customers are searching for:
‘The best panettone French toast’ searches: +123%
‘Christmas Muffins’ searches: +30%
‘Clementine, cranberry & pecan Bircher muesli’ searches: +35%
Notes to Editors
*All sales and search figures are year on year
About Waitrose
Run by over 45,000 passionate Partners, Waitrose has been serving customers for 120 years and offers extraordinary products in our 317 shops and on Waitrose.com. Inspiring food discovery, our expert Partners run almost 800 specialist food service counters in store, where customers can shop a variety of the best quality meat, fresh fish, dry aged beef, sushi, as well as cheese. Our Beer, Wine and Spirits team features the largest number of Masters of Wine of any UK supermarket and we sell nearly 3,000 different wines, beers, ciders, spirits as well as no and low drinks in our shops, on Waitrose.com and Waitrose Cellar. We are committed to selling products which have been responsibly sourced, grown using the very best sustainable farming methods, some of which are grown or trialled on our very own farm, the Leckford Estate. In 2024, Waitrose was granted the Royal Warrant of Appointment to be Grocers and Wine & Spirits Merchant to His Majesty King Charles III.
