What's in your lunchbox?

It's birthday time for sandwich lovers. This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first pre-packed sandwich, which was first sold by Marks & Spencer in 1981. Since then the commercial sandwich market has grown to exceed the entire UK frozen food industry.

Today we eat 11bn sandwiches a year in the UK - that's some 200 sandwiches each. And we buy 2.7bn of them. That makes the commercial sandwich market in the UK worth £4.5bn, says the British Sandwich Association (BSA) in a new report out this month*. And it's growing at a remarkable 8% a year.

Yet despite our seemingly insatiable appetite for sandwiches, we Brits are a pretty conservative lot. The top 10 pre-packed sandwich fillings remain virtually unchanged from year to year, with chicken outstripping all other fillings to take a 30% share. Second is cheese at 14%, and third is ham at 9%. Egg, tuna, prawn, 'breakfast', salmon and 'other meats' complete our top 10 favourite fillings.

So not much scope for new product development then? No so, says Jim Winship, director of the BSA. "Under the surface there's a lot happening. I'd say about 30% of the sandwich market is innovative recipes, new ingredients or new ideas."

For example, the traditional wedge or triangular sandwich still accounts for two thirds of the commercial sandwich market in terms of volume. But wraps have come from nowhere in the last two years to account for an estimated 12% of the sandwich market today and are still growing strongly.

"And baguettes are now one of the biggest growth areas," says Winship, "largely I think because of Subway coming into the market. Subway are now one of the biggest retailers of sandwiches in the UK."

And what's this at number 18 in the BSA latest list of the top 20 sandwiches we buy? It's hoisin duck. "Hoisin duck wasn't even on the radar screen five years ago," says Winship.

There is a lot of innovation within the traditional standard recipe types, suggests Winship, particularly as the industry continues to try to reduce salt and fat without compromising flavour. And there are new products coming onto the shelves all the time. "There is a lot of innovation in the market but it doesn't necessarily sell in high volumes."

Also, that 8% growth is partially driven by an increasing trend towards premium products, says Winship. "People seem to be moving away from cheap and cheerful foods and are prepared to spend a bit more to get what they perceive as better value."

The pre-packed, pre-prepared market is worth £2.1bn, about half the commercial sandwich market. And it is growing at 5-6% a year, suggests Nigel Hunter, managing director of Buckingham Foods, which supplies three major retailers and one coffee bar chain.

"There is a huge amount of new product development taking place all the time. Apart from staples like milk and sugar, I can't think of any prepared food that is eaten with the frequency that sandwiches are eaten. We buy on average two sandwiches a week. And with that level of frequency, the pressure to offer something different, something a bit more interesting, something exciting, is huge."

Feeling the churn

Outside the top 10 lead lines, there is a massive churn in product formats, recipes, and ingredients, says Hunter. "We make about 150 different recipes every day and during the course of a year we will change or launch about 250."

The mainstream triangular bread sandwiches with the main fillings will always be 60-70% of the market, says Hunter. But the other 30% is changing at a phenomenal rate. "Consumers just love trying something different. I'd say that the average life of a new sandwich recipe is probably six to nine months."

Probably the biggest development over the past five years has been the growth of subs, or baguettes, and wraps, says Hunter. "I often think of wraps as the savoury equivalent of an ice cream cornetto - it's an ideal hold-in-the-hand snack."

But the triangle has a number of specific advantages. The plastic or cardboard triangle pack is space efficient and a superb way of showing off the filling. Any new carrier (bread, wrap etc) that is going to be successful will have to be able to show off the filling without risking the filling falling out in transit, argues Hunter.

Hunter also believes that new product development in sandwiches reflects overall food trends. But he can identify two opposing trends. One is the growing requirement for healthier food, "better for you" food.

"What people won't do is compromise too much on flavour for the sake of being healthy. The challenge is how to make really good tasting sandwiches with less salt and less fat."

On the other hand, says Hunter, there is a trend towards indulgence or premium products. "Not just any old ham, but hand-carved Wiltshire ham, for example."

Another trend suggests Richard Esau, director of marketing for Greencore Sandwiches, which makes over 3M sandwiches a week, is in packaging. "There is now focus on compostable packing with companies moving out of traditional PVC and into cardboard packs. But plastic stands a chance of making a comeback with biodegradable plastics made from corn starch. "But we haven't been able to demonstrate that we can form them at low temperatures or get a peelable seal. If the technology can be developed to successfully form, fill and seal these biodegradable plastics, then they would become economic to use," he suggests.

Esau believes the sandwich market today needs to be less concerned with delivering "fancy, different, new" and more concerned with better quality, and provenance of ingredients.

Quality and provenance

"Consumer thinking is starting to move away from 'new is good' and more towards 'more is good'. And once you start focusing on provenance and quality and reducing salt and sugar and artificial additives and so on, then innovation becomes that of how we buy ingredients, how we store them, how we process them, and how we get shelf-life in the finished product."

Esau admits that it is a challenge. "It's about real, difficult technological change. We're not just relying on serendipitously turning out new recipe ideas. We have programmes in place to continuously improve the quality of our food that we work to over a period of years."

So the Holy Grail for product development staff, then, is not to deliver the next magic ingredient or the next wonder wrap, but rather to find ways of improving on the old favourites? "Exactly," says Andy Valentine, head of brand marketing at Ginsters, which produces around 500,000 sandwiches a week.

"At Ginsters we pride ourselves more than anything on flavour. When you eat a Ginsters' sandwich, it is full of flavour - you feel you've eaten something substantial when you've finished.

"Today, customers want the good old mainstream flavours but delivered in a slightly more contemporary way. So we are constantly revisiting our range. It's about constantly reviewing the mayonnaises we use, the salt levels, the spices, the marinades. Or it might be the bread we use, or the wraps - 15% of our sandwich sales are now in wraps."

It took months, for instance, to develop a chicken tikka sandwich that delivered lower calories without compromising on authenticity of flavour, says Valentine.

But there is another trend the sandwich industry needs to address, suggests Winship at the BSA. This is the lunchbox, or rather what is put in it. The lunchbox market is essentially where consumers buy ingredients to make sandwiches and snacks at home to eat later at work or school.

"Our latest assessment is that the lunchbox or carried-out-of-the-home sandwich market is about the same as the commercial sandwich market - about 2.7bn sandwiches a year," says Winship. According to the BSA, we spend about £4bn a year on filling our lunchboxes.

The challenge for the commercial sandwich market is how to address this market. "At the moment if you walk around a supermarket, you find lunchbox contents are never together, they are scattered the length and breadth of the store. There is scope for the pioneering retailers to take charge of the lunchbox market and develop it in a much more structured way."

Winship believes there are opportunities yet to be exploited, for instance, frozen sandwiches that can be used in a lunchbox.

"No one has really got to grips with the frozen sandwich market, probably because frozen is not seen by consumers as being good quality. But frozen is probably fresher in many instances than chilled or fresh." FM

*Report on UK sandwich market available from BSA priced: £950 to members, £1,250 to non-members. Contact: 01291 636331​