Kantar Worldpanel says the £18bn UK market saw value growth of 7.8% in the year to October 30, while volume rose just 2.7%. In 'food on the go', bread substitutes grew the most (up by one third to 20.1M packs on the same period last year). Next was sushi (up 30.5% to 18.6M packs).
Volumes of many traditional categories have struggled though, with cereal bars down 23.2% ; ready-to-serve desserts down 20.7% and nuts and fruit and nut mixtures falling by16.8%.
Kantar Worldpanel's strategic insight director Kerry Corke is pretty downbeat: "NPD is all about limited additions and/or different formats, rather than really 'new' product developments."
Jim Winship, director of the British Sandwich Association has a similar view about sandwiches. "There hasn't been a lot of innovation in the past year or so, because things have been rather tight."
However, dig beneath the surface and there's more than meets the eye. There may be a lot of limited editions, but that doesn't diminish the innovation involved. "The team is working on customer-specific NPD plans," says a spokesman for Greencore, which claims to be the largest sandwich manufacturer in the world. "Key areas are the Queen's [Diamond] Jubilee, the Olympics and Euro 2012. We are working to target these occasions with limited edition products."
Even before that, Symington's, the brains behind Golden Wonder: The Nation's Noodle, has launched a Christmas Dinner noodle snack, containing turkey flavour sauce, cranberry sauce and a mix of winter vegetables.
Meantime, the demand to tighten belts by cutting cost and waste is sometimes inspiring creativity instead of dampening it. A classic example of this is last month's launch of the 21-day shelf-life sandwich, part of Summit Foods' 12-strong Snacksters sandwich range.
Vanessa Lewis, director at Summit Foods, says: "We've selected certain ingredients for the fillings and bread to maximise preservation qualities. Then the sandwiches are packaged in a gas-flushed atmosphere. Although the government is taking steps to help reduce food waste by eliminating sell-by dates on food products, we believe it's also up to the food manufacturing industry itself to innovate."
On cost-cutting, Winship says: "Raw material price and currency volatility has had a quite considerable effect on commodity prices. Cheese prices and flour prices have been pushed up and there's a knock-on effect [on sandwiches] from meat."
There's a silver lining to every cloud, with the economic downturn prompting some shoppers to trade down by buying premium sandwiches from sandwich bars, rather than lunching out, he says. However, most are picking the other end of the spectrum, says Corke: "Value is in growth due to price (driven by raw material costs)." And a Greencore spokesman agrees. "Due to economic conditions, value sandwiches are driving volume in the sandwich market."
There are other areas to celebrate outside of sandwiches. Keen to revive cereal bars, in 2012 Kellogg's is relaunching Nutri-Grain bars to include Soft & Fruity (formerly Soft Bakes), Elevenses bakes and new Nutri-Grain Crunchy bars. The Crunchy Bars come in Oats & Honey and Chocolate Chip variants. This is on top of the launch of a Rocky Road flavour Rice Krispies Squares bar and fibre-rich All Bran Breakfast Biscuits, designed to be dunked in hot drinks.
And with health representing a major trend, Limagrain Céréales Ingrédients (LCI) has developed 0.5% and salt-free pellets for savoury snacks and cereal-based pellets for hot air expansion, rather than frying. "We see more snack manufacturers who have invested in hot air technology," says Patricia Panel-Dusséaux, LCI marketing manager, snacks and breakfast cereals. It seems innovation is alive and well after all.