Average European bought more private labels in 2023, Belgians and Dutch did not

Last year, European shoppers bought significantly more private label products than in 2022, courtesy of high food inflation. Remarkably, the Belgians and the Dutch bought fewer private label products.

Shrinking market

European food retailers sold 2 % more private label products last year, with Portugal (+ 9 %), Czechia (+ 8 %), Poland (+ 6 %) and Spain (+ 5 %) as the biggest growers. On the other hand, shoppers in the Netherlands and Belgium (both – 1 %) and in Hungary (- 8 %) bought fewer private label products. The decline in these three countries is a consequence of an overall shrinking food market, as volume share did increase there, the new yearbook of private brand association PLMA revealed using figures from NielsenIQ for seventeen European markets.

That European volume increase for private brands marks a break in the trend: in 2022, private brands only gained market share as their volumes sold fell less than those of branded products. That was due to record year 2021, when the entire food market grew strongly due to the pandemic. In 2023, the food market – including branded items – shrank further: in eleven of the seventeen countries surveyed, consumers bought fewer items, leading to an overall volume decline of 1 %.

Impact of inflation

In terms of value, the European FMCG market did grow last year: inflation pushed sales 9 % higher to 883 billion euros. Private labels accounted for 38.5 % (or 340 billion euros) of this total. They saw sales grow by 13 %, indicating that private label prices increased more than those of brands.

In ten of the seventeen countries surveyed, cheese is the most important category for private brands. Cheese was also the category with the strongest sales growth for private brands in Europe, followed by bread, sweet biscuits, yogurt and frozen potato products.

Switzerland remains the country with the highest share of private brands, but the ceiling seems to have been reached: it is the only country with single-digit value share growth (+ 4 %), while private brand sales grew by at least 10 % in all the other countries surveyed.