What you need to know
After a long period of declining sales, cooking sauces bounced back in 2019, with sales estimated to increase by 4.5% to £815 million. Strong demand for convenience as well as interest in world cuisines put cooking and pasta sauces in a good position to consolidate 2019’s return to growth.
Convenience is a major driver of usage of cooking sauces, but brands need their products to appeal beyond being an emergency meal solution to increase usage frequency. Convenience needs to be elevated through an emphasis on being a short cut for hard-to-make dishes, especially those from ethnic cuisines, and suggestions on adding extra ingredients to shop-bought sauces.
Given the high interest, more healthy sauces will be important in increasing usage, while messages about authenticity will help to add value to the market. The latter includes sauces that replicate popular restaurant dishes, including those from emerging cuisines, as well as products that taste like home-made sauces. The meat-free meal trend is also a notable opportunity for brands.
Products covered in this Report
This Report examines the UK retail market for cooking and pasta sauces.
Cooking and pasta sauces are defined as sauces used during the preparation of food and those used in the kitchen, rather than at the table. They fall into three categories:
Cook-in sauces (including cooking pastes) are added to ingredients at an early stage of cooking, such as chilli con carne or Bolognese. Stir-fry sauces and stir-fry pastes are a style of cook-in sauce primarily intended for use with a wok or quick frying style of cooking.
Pour-over sauces are added to the meal just before the end of cooking, or poured over the top just before serving, such as parsley sauce, some pasta sauces and pesto sauce.
Oven-bake sauces are added to the other ingredients part way through cooking before the dish is placed in the oven.
The cooking and pasta sauces market may also be divided into wet sauces and dry sauces:
Wet sauces are packaged in jars, cans, pouches or cartons and may be ambient or chilled.
Dry sauces come in packets or cartons and require the addition of water or other liquid to rehydrate them before use.
Excluded from this Report:
Table sauces such as tomato ketchup, apple sauce and cranberry sauce (for the purpose of this Report, soy sauce is treated as a table sauce and is excluded from the Report).
Salad dressings such as salad cream and mayonnaise.
Dips, including salsa dip.
Sauce bases such as passata and concentrates such as tomato purée.
Stocks and bouillons.
Sales of cooking and pasta sauces via catering or foodservice establishments are also excluded, although references and comparisons to these sectors may be made where relevant.
