Live News From Spain As It Happens

THIS year's Top Ten Most Innovative Products list for Spain has been released by Kantar World Panel and shows the most popular supermarket in the country to be Lidl, followed in joint second by Mercadona and Día%. And it shows that new product design in Spain is extremely limited compared to the rest of Europe, with only two Spanish brands having more than one item in the Top Ten. In fact, another two brands in the list were not even Spanish, but French and British-cum-Dutch. The German store accounts for 79.5 per cent of the market share, with Mercadona and Día% taking 55.5 and 55 respectively and Eroski Supermarkets 32.6 – as opposed to Eroski Hypermarkets with 27.6, just 0.1 per cent higher than Carrefour. Consum and AhorraMás hold 28.2 and 29 per cent of the market respectively, whilst Caprabo accounts for 21.3 and Alcampo just 17.9. In Spain, eight in 10 people shop at just 2.1 grocery stores a year, says the Kantar World Panel Innovation Radar. Two in three new products are not discovered until a customer goes into the store, and Spain is near the bottom of the European heap for innovation in mass-marketed products, with Romania and Sweden at the top and the UK somewhere in the middle. Conclusions say innovation in Spain is very scarce, poorly distributed and has little success, mainly because of lack of funds to invest in new products and ideas and the fact that most of those which are launched are not available in stores frequently used by the average consumer.  

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