Estimated at £3.9 billion, total sales of bread and baked goods grew by almost 8% over 2010-15, with volumes seeing a 0.7% fall over this period.

Eight in 10 UK adults buy packaged sliced loaves of bread and nine in 10 eat it, demonstrating the popularity of the product as a household staple. Value sales saw a decline over 2014-15, however, impacting sales in the overall market, prepacked bread accounting for more than two fifths of the bread and baked goods market.

Health-related concerns are amongst the key barriers to more frequent usage of packaged sliced bread among infrequent users. Among these concerns, carbohydrates and calorie content are on a par.

This report examines the retail market for bread and baked goods in the UK. For the purpose of this report the market is classified as follows:

Mintel’s definition follows the classification used in the baking industry, and includes a wide variety of both traditional British products and other breads not of UK origin.

Traditional British breads include: white, brown and wholemeal, which may be sliced or unsliced, wrapped or unwrapped. A distinction is drawn between bread that is baked by plant/factory bakeries and stocked on grocery shelves (also called prepacked bread), and bread that is baked by in-store bakers. Part-baked products are also included. Please see the Appendix for further information on bread.

• The sweet baked goods market can be subdivided into: brioche loaves and rolls, croissants, crumpets, English muffins, farls, fruit loaves, hot cross buns, Irish bread, malt loaves, pains au chocolat and raisins, pikelets, potato cakes, scones, teacakes, American muffins, fruit buns and iced buns.

• Doughnuts are also included in the market value as they are stocked with other baked goods.

• Please note that the market size for this report differs from the Mintel Market Sizes Sweet Bakery market size because MMS Sweet Bakery includes other products such as chilled cakes, pies and tarts, which are outside the scope of this report, and outside the scope of the market size for this report.

• The market size for this report differs from the MMS Bread and Bread Products market size because MMS Bread and Bread Products includes savoury pastries and pies (eg meat pies/quiche) which are outside the scope of this report. MMS Bread and Bread Products also exclude unpackaged/unwrapped products and sweet baked goods such as croissants and fruit loaf, which are included within the market size for this report.

• For the purposes of this report, the speciality bread market is taken to include: bagels, baguettes, pittas, wraps, chapattis, naan breads, panini and garlic bread (brown, seeded and white, but excluding chilled garlic bread).