County supermarket's festive sales celebration

The family-owned independent Northern food and drink retailer, tracked a strong like for like retail sales increase of 6.5 per cent over the key three week trading period, while also recording its best ever Christmas week customer satisfaction score.

Total revenue including business to business and wholesale sales increased by 4.3 per cent from 2020.

The firm said that this rounded off a strong period of performance throughout the key trading quarter which saw retail like for like growth of 4.2 per cent on 2020.

Chief operating officer Nigel Murray said: “I’m delighted to report growth on growth figures for a third consecutive year. Christmas at Booths is a true team effort of 12 months in the planning.

“Our 3,000 colleagues strive to deliver the very best food and drink along with our renowned warm Northern welcome.

“I pay particular credit to the teams who kept smiling behind their facemasks to deliver warm and friendly service in our stores and the top levels of quality and availability achieved against some incredibly challenging market conditions.”

Booths said that its customers planned and ordered early using its annual festive catalogue, with significant increases seen in the number of Christmas pre-orders received in October and November.

It said that customers clearly trusted Booths to ‘deliver the goods’ as the final trading week saw record sales levels achieved.

Customers had decided to treat themselves this festive season after last year’s was marred by pandemic restrictions.

Champagne sales rose by 21 per cent compared with 2020. English wines, both still and sparkling, sold 4 per cent more than in 2020 and frozen party food grow by 170 per cent, frozen desserts by 41 per cent and poultry up 14 per cent per cent against 2020.

Booths made 400,000 pigs in blankets and three tonnes of goose fat potatoes.