Consumers in Northern Ireland - A food briefing

Introduction

Food inflation has remained at high levels over recent months, it was 18.4% in May 2023. Which?’s research has shown that these historically high price rises in the food sector are having a major impact on consumers across the UK, forcing them to cutback, seek special offers and even skip meals [1]. Our research shows that as a result, it is becoming more difficult for people to eat healthily, particularly those who are facing most financial difficulty. 56% of consumers in Northern Ireland say they are finding eating healthily more difficult due to the cost of living crisis, rising to over eight in ten (86%) of those who are struggling the most financially.

Consumers in Northern Ireland are facing unprecedented challenges and there is a lot more that the UK Government and/or the Executive, as well as the food sector, can do to support consumers. Which?’s Affordable Food For All campaign focuses on the important role that supermarkets can play in supporting people to access affordable food and ensure that they are able to choose the best value products through this crisis.

In this briefing, we share the latest data on how these sustained high levels of food inflation are impacting consumer behaviour in Northern Ireland, drawing on a previously unpublished, nationally representative survey of consumers in Northern Ireland conducted in December 2022.  We explore how consumers in Northern Ireland have been affected by rising food prices, how this impact differs for more vulnerable groups, and what changes consumers in Northern Ireland would like supermarkets to make to help out during this crisis. We also highlight which neighbourhoods in Northern Ireland are most likely to find it difficult to access affordable food, and thus where interventions will be most valuable, using our Priority Places for Food index - a tool developed by Which? and the Consumer Data Research Centre at the University of Leeds to help identify places in the UK where people are most likely to need support to access affordable food.

You can access our complete library of data to understand the challenges facing consumers from our consumer data hub.

 Our key findings

• Worry about food prices is rising across all consumers in Northern Ireland, however working-age parents are the most worried, with over 9 in 10 stating they were worried about food prices.
• Over eight in ten, 86% of consumers in Northern Ireland are taking some form of action to save money on food.
• Consumers in Northern Ireland would most like supermarkets to support them through this time of high food inflation by having more loyalty card discounts and promotions for healthier products and more budget range foods available.
• There is a greater concentration of priority places (i.e., the 20% neighbourhoods most in need of support, identified by our Priority Places for Food Index [2]) in rural areas in the North and West of Northern Ireland, as well as in areas of higher urban poverty such as Londonderry and West Belfast.

The vast majority of consumers in Northern Ireland are worried about food prices

Food inflation has remained at high levels over recent months, it was 18.4% in May 2023 [3]. Supermarket prices have been rising most for essential products such as cheese and yoghurts, with Which?’s food inflation tracker finding these products rose on average by 24.6% and 21.1% respectively in the year to May 2023 [4]. These sustained high levels of inflation are impacting living standards, with a larger impact on low income households [5] who proportionately spend more on these essential goods.

Consumers in Northern Ireland have become increasingly concerned about food prices, with the latest data showing 89% are worried about food prices, up 10 percentage points from the previous year. The Consumer Council also found all consumers in their study were noticing steep increases in the cost of their food shop [6].

The worry about food prices is greatest among working-age parents surveyed in Northern Ireland, as shown in Figure 1, with over nine in ten, 95%, worried. This is higher than the level of worry among working-age parents surveyed in the other three nations, Scotland, England and Wales where respectively, 93%, 90% and 88% are worried.

Figure 1: Over nine in ten working-age parents surveyed in Northern Ireland are worried about food prices

The level of worry is higher for low income consumers surveyed [7] in Northern Ireland with over nine in ten worried, 94%, compared with 90% of higher income consumers in Northern Ireland. The level of worry for low income consumers is higher than equivalent consumers surveyed in the other three nations, Scotland, England and Wales where respectively, 91%, 91% and 86% of low income consumers surveyed are worried in the latest data. 

While marginal, these differences suggest that households in Northern Ireland, particularly those in more challenging circumstances, are consistently finding the cost of living crisis more difficult than their peers in other parts of the UK. 

 How are consumers in Northern Ireland responding to rising food prices?

The vast majority of consumers in Northern Ireland are responding to their worry about food prices by actively trying to reduce their food bill. Over eight in ten, 86%, consumers are taking at least one action to reduce their food bill.

Figure 2: Over eight in ten consumers in Northern Ireland are taking at least one action to reduce their food bills

Consumers in Northern Ireland [8] told us some of the ways they are reducing the cost of their food bill.

“...I’m buying cheaper brands to afford my food shop.” Panel member

“I try to cook using a microwave as much as possible and this means missing out on some types of foods or recipes.” Male, 72

They are not alone in taking steps to reduce the cost of their food bill. Two-thirds (66%) of consumers in Northern Ireland are buying cheaper products and over half (55%) are shopping around in cheaper supermarkets or online. The Consumer Council also found consumers in Northern Ireland were shopping around to find better value and some were buying own-brand products and looking for cheaper alternatives [9]. These actions reduce the cost of food bills without necessarily reducing consumption, but might reduce the healthiness of the food consumed.

Our survey suggests this is the case, with 56% of consumers in Northern Ireland saying they are finding eating healthily more difficult due to the cost of living crisis, rising to over eight in ten, 86%, of those who say they are struggling the most financially. 

Consumers in Northern Ireland who are finding it harder to eat healthily due to the cost of living crisis told us some of the reasons why they are finding it more difficult.

“Lack of availability of healthier products (for example wholemeal varieties of products like noodles or pasta).” Female, 52

“Healthier food in the supermarkets can sometimes be a lot more expensive than unhealthy foods which makes it harder and makes it hesitant to buy.”  Female, 24

Many are taking more drastic steps to reduce the cost of their food bill. 13% of consumers in Northern Ireland reported going without or skipping meals and 8.5% were prioritising meals for other family members. Even more worrying, over one in five (21%) of working-age parents in Northern Ireland are prioritising meals for other family members and more than a quarter (27%) of low income consumers in Northern Ireland are skipping meals.

What neighbourhoods in Northern Ireland are most in need?

There are many reasons why people may find it difficult to access affordable food. Some relate to individuals' circumstances, like lower incomes. Other reasons relate to the place that someone lives, such as the level of retail provision or the quality of public transport. In the case of accessing affordable food online, barriers may be both place-based (limited or no online deliveries) or related to the individual (limited capability to shop online). 

Our Priority Places for Food Index [10], developed in partnership with the Consumer Data Research Centre at the University of Leeds, draws together data that captures all of these elements to identify priority places where interventions to help people access affordable food will be most valuable. For Northern Ireland, this composite index combines data from four different factors [11]. Two factors focus on the likely need of individuals in a local area for affordable food and their ability to access it. These factors cover socio-economic barriers (income deprivation and car access) and the likely need for family food support (for example eligibility for free school meals). The other two factors relate to the level of opportunity to access food retailers in different local areas. These factors are the proximity of supermarket retail facilities, and proximity to non-supermarket food provision. Further detail on the Priority Places for Food Index and the factors are provided in the annex.

A higher proportion of priority places in Northern Ireland are in rural areas compared to the other three nations. This is reflective of the higher rurality of Northern Ireland.

Figure 3: Over two-fifths of priority places in Northern Ireland are in rural places

Priority places in Northern Ireland Constituencies

To further explore how priority places are distributed around Northern Ireland we have aggregated local areas up to the level of Westminster parliamentary constituency, as shown in Table 1. 89% of Northern Irish Constituencies have at least one priority place, and in six constituencies over a third of the neighbourhoods are priority places. There is a greater concentration of priority places in rural areas in the North and West of Northern Ireland, as well as in areas of higher urban poverty such as Londonderry and West Belfast.

Table 1: 6 Northern Irish Westminster parliamentary constituencies where over a third of the neighbourhoods are a priority place

Case study: East Londonderry (ranked 1st of 18 Northern Irish parliamentary constituencies)

Case study: Belfast West (ranked 5th of 18 Northern Irish parliamentary constituencies)

Healthy Start takeup

Government has an important role in providing a nutritional safety net and ensuring that there are adequate protections in place as people are increasingly trading down. With so many people, especially families, skipping meals, the need for support is obvious. One route is the NHS Healthy Start Scheme [12], which offers financial support with food spending to low-income families in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Healthy Start provides pregnant women or families with children under four on qualifying benefits or tax credits money towards some healthy foods, including milk, infant formula and fruit and vegetables. Since April 2021, it has been worth £8.50 per week for children from birth to one and £4.25 for all other recipients. 

However, participation in the scheme has varied over time and across locations. In May 2023, 55% of the 20,817 eligible individuals in Northern Ireland were participating in the scheme. Participation is lower in Northern Ireland compared to England, 65%, and Wales, 69%, and, all three nations have lower participation than the similar scheme in Scotland, Best Start Foods, which had an estimated 88% takeup in 2021/22 [13].

Participation rose significantly as the scheme moved from using paper vouchers to a prepaid card between September 2021 to March 2022 as shown in Figure 4. During this rollout period, participation increased by 14 percentage points from 56% to 70% across Northern Ireland. However, participation has fallen since March 2022. This is likely due to some people choosing not to reapply for the new prepaid card scheme when the paper vouchers were stopped.

Figure 4: Take up of the Healthy Start scheme increased during the roll out of the pre-paid system but has since fallen

Takeup is low across all Primary Care Trusts in Northern Ireland. In May 2023, the lowest participation was 50% in the Southern Primary Care Trust and the highest 58% in the Belfast Primary Care Trust. Currently 9,467 individuals in Northern Ireland aren’t using the vouchers they are eligible for and collectively missing out on at least £2 million a year worth of vouchers. 

Action is needed to improve take-up, for example through auto enrollment, and to also ensure that the value of Healthy Start payments is up-rated in line with food price inflation. Supermarkets also have an important role helping to promote the scheme and make it easy for people to use in their stores. But it is also important that they go further than this providing targeted support for people who are most in need.

The role for supermarkets

With so many consumers in Northern Ireland already actively reducing the cost of their food bill, there’s not much left that consumers can do themselves without further lowering their living standards. They will look for support from a range of sources, including government, charities and local community groups. However, the fundamental role of the largest supermarkets in the UK’s grocery market means that these businesses have a key role to play in supporting communities. 

Which?’s Affordable Food for All Campaign has focused on three main areas where supermarkets can play an important role: ensuring the availability of healthy choices, including an essential range of budget lines across all of their stores, making it easier to assess best value by ensuring unit pricing is clear and included on promotions and loyalty card offers and targeting promotions to support people who are most in need. In the case of promotions, Sainsbury’s is for example providing additional £2 top ups for its customers who are eligible for the scheme.

We asked consumers in Northern Ireland to pick three options that would help them save the most money on food in supermarkets, from a range of possible actions that supermarkets already are or could be taking, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Over third of consumers in Northern Ireland would like more promotions on healthy products and ingredients

The most popular choice was having more loyalty card discounts on healthier products, which was chosen by 36% of consumers in Northern Ireland. Over a third, 35%, of consumers in Northern Ireland also think having more budget range foods available at supermarkets would help them save money. This will be particularly key in places with only small stores nearby, or where consumers are more likely to have limited mobility or access to transport to access larger stores, as we recently found that small stores are likely to have little to no stock of an essential basket of budget line items [14]. Looking across demographics, working-age parents in Northern Ireland are more likely to say that higher availability of budget lines will help them (41%) than working age consumers without children (38%) or pensioners (25%).

Other popular choices included, ‘more promotions on healthy products and ingredients’ and ‘personalised loyalty card discounts targeting the things I normally buy’ which were all chosen by at least 30% consumers in Northern Ireland.

Actions supermarkets can take will be most beneficial if targeted at communities in places with the most need for them. For example, the importance of providing budget lines that support healthy eating, tailoring marketing budgets and promotions, promoting the Healthy Start scheme will all vary from place to place and to be most effective retailers may want to focus their efforts on particular places using the Priority Places for Food Index. Our Index is able to show which supermarkets are located in which areas and what type of store they have. It also shows other food retailers. This tool therefore enables supermarkets to see where they can most usefully focus their efforts.

Conclusion

Sustained high food prices are causing widespread hardship for consumers in Northern Ireland. The vast majority are both concerned about food prices and taking actions to reduce their food bill. The most vulnerable (households with children and those on lower incomes) are the most worried about food prices and significantly more likely to be engaging in potentially harmful behaviours such as skipping meals. It is therefore crucial that people are given the support they need to navigate the current crisis and access healthy, affordable food.

There are a wide range of actions that the government needs to take to support households through this crisis. This includes ongoing support for energy bills and providing an effective nutritional safety net for families who are most vulnerable. More generally there has to be a transition to a more sustainable and resilient food system. However, at this time of crisis, we believe that businesses also have a crucial role to play and that supermarkets in particular could do a lot  more to support their customers. A range of essential budget lines that support a healthy diet need to be available in smaller, as well as larger stores and pricing should be made clearer and more transparent across the board, including by providing unit pricing on loyalty card offers.

Some solutions will benefit from careful targeting. The Priority Places for Food Index has identified parts of Northern Ireland where people are most likely to need support in accessing affordable food and can be used as a tool for government, retailers and others trying to support consumers through the cost of living crisis.

Annex

The Priority Places for Food Index

The Priority Places for Food Index has been developed by the ESRC-funded Consumer Data Research Centre at the University of Leeds in collaboration with Which?. It uses data across a range of relevant factors to rank neighbourhoods by the likelihood of people living there needing support to access affordable food.

Crucially, the Priority Places for Food Index makes it possible to identify places in need and also to understand why they have been identified, whether because of a lack of retail provision, poor access to online supermarket deliveries, or high levels of deprivation and need. The index has been mapped and can be found here, with the technical documentation supporting the index can be found on the CDRC website.

The Priority Places for Food Index is a composite index that combines data from seven different factors for England, Wales and Scotland and each contains underlying metrics (see Annex table 1). Three of these factors focus on the likely need of individuals in a local area for affordable food and their ability to access it. The factors cover socio-economic barriers (income deprivation and car access), the likely need for family food support (for example, eligibility for free school meals) and measures of fuel poverty. These three factors are equally weighed in the composite index and together account for 50% of the total.

The final four factors relate to the level of access to food retailers in different neighbourhoods. These factors are the proximity of supermarket retail facilities, the accessibility of supermarket retail facilities, access to online deliveries and proximity to non-supermarket food provision. These four factors account for the remaining 50% of the total index, with each being equally weighted at 12.5%.

For Northern Ireland, data is not available for all seven factors. So for Northern Ireland, two factors focus on the likely need of individuals in a local area for affordable food and their ability to access it. The factors cover socio-economic barriers (income deprivation and car access) and the likely need for family food support (for example, eligibility for free school meals). These two factors are equally weighed in the composite index and together account for 50% of the total.

The other two factors relate to the level of access to food retailers in different neighbourhoods. These factors are the proximity of supermarket retail facilities and proximity to non-supermarket food provision. These two factors account for the remaining 50% of the total index.

Annex table 1: Factors and metrics used in the index and national variation

Survey

Yonder, on behalf of Which? conducted an online survey of consumers in each of the UK nations from 25th November-6th December 2022. A minimum of 1,000 respondents were recruited for each of the four nations, with quotas and response weighting used to obtain a nationally representative sample for each nation according to their known age and gender profiles (updated this year using the ONS mid-2021 population estimates). Sample sizes and question text are noted below the relevant charts throughout the reports.

Panel

We use insights from our Which? Cost of Living panel. The panel is made up of 29 households from across the UK where participants complete monthly online tasks and in-depth interviews. In January 2023, participants were interviewed to understand the impact of the cost of living crisis on their households. As part of this, they were asked to reflect on any adjustments they have made over the past 6 months and any challenges they might encounter going forward.

Footnotes

[1] Which? (2022) Affordable Food for All: how supermarkets can help in the cost of food crisis; Which? (2023) Financial wellbeing in February 2023  ↑

[2] Consumer Data Research Centre and Which? (2022) Priority Places for Food Index  ↑

[3] Office for National Statistics (2023) Consumer price inflation, UK: May 2023  ↑

[4] Which? (2023) What's happening to supermarket food prices?  ↑

[5] Consumer Council (2022) Northern Ireland Household Expenditure Tracker Q4 2022  ↑

[6] Ipsos and Consumer Council (2022) Consumer Food Shopping Experiences research  ↑

[7] Self reported as having a household income less than £21,000, sample size is 225  ↑

[8] The first quote is from a member of our Cost of Living research panel living in Northern Ireland. All other quotes are from consumers from Northern Ireland surveyed in a survey by Yonder, on behalf of Which? conducted an online survey of consumers in each of the UK nations from 25th November-6th December 2022  ↑

[9] Ipsos and Consumer Council (2022) Consumer Food Shopping Experiences research  ↑

[10] The index uses data for very low level geographies and refers to small areas of similar population size. It is constructed individually for each of the nations of the UK as not all of the same data is available for each nation, so direct comparisons cannot be made between places in different nations  ↑

[11]  For the other three nations, the index combines data from seven different factors. The difference is due to differences in data availability between the nations. More detail on the differences can be found in Annex A Table 1  ↑

[12] NHS (2023) Get help to buy food and milk(the Healthy Start scheme)  ↑

[13] Scottish Government (2023) Social Security (Scotland) Act (2018): Devolved Social Security Assistance, Uprating for Inflation - A report in fulfilment of section 86A: Duty to consider effects of inflation  ↑

[14] Which? (2023) Just the basics: Assessing the availability of supermarket budget ranges  ↑

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