This week Down Under

Woolworths’ three retail brands dominate Australian liquor landscape

By RJ Whitehead

- Last updated on GMT

Related tags Wine

Woolworths’ three retail brands dominate Australian liquor landscape
Almost 5m Australians each buy an average of over A$60 worth of alcohol each week, according to new figures by Roy Morgan Research.

The country’s 4.8m liquor consumers purchase wines, beers and spirits worth almost A$296m between them every week, the survey found, with Dan Murphy’s being the main retail beneficiary.

The liquor megastore came top not only in market share but also in consumer numbers. In any given week, 1.2m Australians—or almost a quarter of all liquor buyers—will shop at Dan Murphy’s and spend an average of A$67 there each.

Booze

The store’s 26% share of all alcohol dollars spent is well ahead of runner-up BWS, whose own share occupies 18% of the market.

BWS, with 1.1m weekly shoppers on average, is only just behind Dan Murphy’s in terms of customer volume, though its customers spend considerably less on average ($48) than visitors to Dan Murphy’s, at A$48.

Liquorland (10.8% of total market dollars), 1st Choice (6.3%) and wine clubs such as Cellarmasters and the Wine Society (4.8%) complete the top-five liquor retailers with respect to market-share size. 

But where a retailer sits in term of market share does not always correspond to the volume of customers shopping with them each week, Roy Morgan found, with wine clubs being the most striking example of this. 

While their customers spend a hefty A$194 each week on premium stock, they don’t even appear on the top 10 in terms customer numbers. Used by 74,000 Australian adults each week, these online retailers tend to specialise in bulk sales, such as cases of wine, rather than spontaneous and one-off purchases. 

The opposite pattern is true of Aldi Liquor, which attracts the fifth-biggest number of shoppers, at just over 250,000, but only 2.2% of total dollars spent due to their customers’ low average spend of A$26 do to its low-end stock.

Roy Morgan’s Andrew Price said these latest findings will come as good news to Woolworths. The retail giant owns both Dan Murphy’s and BWS, which together account for just over 44% of Australia’s liquor market, as well as Cellarmasters.

With its enormous, well-stocked stores, low-price policy and strong online presence, clearly Dan Murphy is ticking all the right boxes among Australia’s alcohol buyers, who not only flock there in droves but rack up one of the higher average weekly spends​,” said Price. 

BWS serves a different purpose, being geared more towards convenience with its stores located adjacent to Woolworths supermarkets​.

With its three very different liquor retail offerings, Woolworths seems well positioned to thrive in this competitive market even as the proportion of Australians drinking and buying alcohol continues to decline​.” 

More stories from Down Under…

Researchers develop phone app to assess scale of vineyard disease

An iPhone app has been designed to help grape growers make informed decisions over the quality and price of their grapes.

Mildew

It will do so by making it easier to visually assess the grape and wine sector’s most costly disease, powdery mildew, according to the app’s developers at the University of Adelaide. 

Supported by Wine Australia as part of a wider research project to establish objective measures for quantifying powdery mildew, PMapp was designed in close consultation with viticulturists to reduce losses that add up to the tens of millions of dollars each year, says Eileen Scott, a plant pathologist, who led the project.

Powdery mildew is a serious disease of grapevines worldwide and, in Australia, has an estimated annual cost of $76 million through yield loss and the cost of control​,” she said.

It causes serious quality issues with bad flavours and aromas in wine and we’ve seen that with small amounts of the surface area of Chardonnay bunches affected by powdery mildew there is an oily ‘mouth-feel’ in the resulting wine​.

The wine sector therefore has a very low tolerance of powdery mildew on grapes with downgrading at 3–6% or rejection when disease is more severe. This is a costly disease for the grape and wine community​.”

Yet, though it is ubiquitous, powdery mildew is hard to assess as its symptoms can be difficult to see, or easily confused with dust or spray residue.

Professor Scott says that the Papp app can record of the severity and incidence of powdery mildew in a vineyard by assessing infection levels.

By matching a bunch of grapes with a computer generated image, the app allows wine growers to quickly estimate how much of the surface area it covers. 

It then calculates the proportion of the bunches affected and the severity, and reports the data in a spreadsheet for analysis. 

A key reference of images built into the app also helps wine growers to become familiar with the various disease patterns and severities. A website to support the app is currently being developed and is scheduled for release this month.

Bird watching found to be a critical factor in monitoring fisheries

By studying bird vomit, Lachlan McLeay believes he has developed an approach to gauging sardine abundance in Australian waters.

Sardine

The researcher’s work has focused on observing the diet, health and population dynamics of crested terns, a small fish-eating seabird living in marine waters of South Australia.

My data shows that information collected from crested terns can be used to monitor marine ecosystem health, such as the abundance of sardines in the ocean​,” says Dr McLeay, of the South Australian Research and Development Institute.

The number of sardines in Australian waters is currently estimated by weighing up the active biomass, based on the production of eggs by female adult fish, against fisheries’ catch data.

This technique, however, does not take into account the ecological interactions sardines have with many species, including terns.

To develop a new approach to measuring fish abundance, Dr McLeay focused on two major sardine mortality events of the 1990s, when approximately 70% of adult sardines in South Australian waters died due to a virus.

The researcher found that terns rely on sardines in their diet—a factor that can be monitored by recording their vomit—and that the survival of tern chicks is related directly to sardine abundance.

Using GPS tracking devices, he also found that adult terns have a restricted foraging range, making them particularly vulnerable to losses in local sardine numbers.

My data shows that we can use terns to help us inform conservation strategies and manage marine resources better​,” Dr McLeay says.

He hopes that terns will provide a tool for enhancing management practices for Australia’s largest fishing ground, the South Australian sardine fishery.

Related topics Markets Beer, Wine, Spirits, Cider

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