Pub visits up on weekdays but down on weekends

The NPD Pub Tracker also revealed that adult-only meal occasions increased by 1% during the year with family visits up 0.4% and accounting for 19.8% of all meal occasions.

Interestingly, 36% of visits were at lunch, 38% at dinner and 11% for breakfast. When looking at sales for those visits, dinner accounted for 48%, lunch 38% and breakfast at 7%. The remainder of both visits and sales were 'snacking' occasions.

Visits prompted by meals and promotions decreased by 5.9% meaning a total of 29.1% of all visits to pubs were driven by those means. Meanwhile non-promoted visits grew by 3.4%, across both branded and independent pubs.

“In the past 12 months to June 2017, pubs grew traffic at a rate that was slightly behind the wider foodservice market (total out of home 0.7%; pubs 0.4%),” said Cyril Lavenant, director of Foodservice UK at NPD.

“The main factor contributing to this slower-than-market performance is the continuing trend of independent pubs losing traffic (branded pubs increased traffic by 1.9% in the year to end of June; independents saw traffic reduce by 2.5%).”

He said that the UK has now recorded its weakest six months of GDP growth since 2012 and this has impacted consumer confidence.

“This was the lowest level since the EU referendum results a year earlier. Branded pubs seem, so far, to have overcome the current challenging economic climate," he said.

“To maintain traffic growth, the branded pub channel needs to continue listening to consumers to understand exactly what they are looking for. Providing those affordable yet high-quality meals with an extraordinary experience will be a key requirement.”