Premier Foods bolstered by demand for instant noodles

THE owner of Batchelors Super Noodles has been boosted by demand for its ready meals as soaring grocery inflation forces cash-strapped shoppers to cut back.

Premier Foods, which also owns the instant noodle brand Nissin, said sales were up 6pc to £197m in the three months to July 2 compared with a year earlier.

Alex Whitehouse, chief executive, said the company had seen a particularly strong performance from its dried noodle products, which he attributed to the fact that “consumers are increasingly looking to cook tasty, affordable meals at home”.

This shift towards products that are seen as “good value” comes as “household budgets become ever stretched”, Premier Foods said. A packet of Super Noodles, for example, sells for around 80p, while Nissin noodles retail at around 65p.

Premier Foods, which also owns Mr Kipling, Bisto and Homepride, said it had raised prices in the latest quarter, meaning volumes sold in supermarkets were slightly lower.

It said the price increases had helped it to recover input cost increases, with ingredients such as wheat and oil having become more expensive over the past year. Mr Whitehouse said the company continued “to monitor the situation closely”.

Price increases have been rife across the industry and earlier this week Kantar showed families were now on course to spend another £454 on grocery bills this year compared to last year, with supermarket inflation running at around 10pc this month.

Kantar’s Fraser Mckevitt said: “This is the second highest level of grocery inflation that we’ve seen since we started tracking prices in this way in 2008, and we’re likely to surpass the previous high come August.”

In London, the hike in prices across the board has prompted more households to cut back on dining out, with separate figures from the CGA Business Tracker yesterday showing like-for-like sales at the capital’s restaurants, pubs and bars were down 1pc in June compared with pre-pandemic levels.

Premier Foods said it had also experienced a sales uptick in other markets, including in Australia, where its Mr Kipling cakes proved particularly popular. Sales in other countries outside the UK were up 12pc on last year.

Jefferies analyst Martin Deboo said Premier Foods now had a “notably more confident tone” over its full-year outlook, which was “underpinned by good progress on input cost recovery”.