Thu 3rd Dec 2015 - NPD Group – Great British Bake Off has boosted cake and dessert demand NPD Group – Great British Bake Off has boosted cake and dessert demand: Insights firm NPD Group has reported strong growth in demand for bakery items since the Great British Bake Off launched. For the year ending September 2015, customers ate a record 1.5 billion servings of all items in the sweet bakery and dessert categories (comprising cookies, tea biscuits, scones, pastries – including Danish, muffins, doughnuts, croissants, tarts, pies and crumbles, cakes, puddings and brownies). This is up 5.5% on the previous year and some 9.2% more than for the year ending September 2010. The top five sweet bakery and dessert goodies account for more than 1 billion of the 1.5 billion servings. Since the year ending September 2010, annual servings of cakes are up 9.6% (36 million extra servings) and it’s a similar story for croissants (up 21% over five years: 27 million extra servings), cookies (up 18% over five years: 23 extra million servings), brownies (up 72%: 62 million extra servings) and muffins (up 27%: 30 million extra servings). Muriel Illig, foodservice account manager, The NPD Group, said: “Has the Great British Bake Off stimulated our appetite for these treats? Yes, the figures show that when it comes to servings of the top five sweet bakery and dessert favourites it’s very much a case of the Great British Bakery and Dessert Take-Off. With another Bake-Off series next summer, we’ll once again watch tasty bakes come to life – and many more of us will be tempted by these goodies. We have certainly been buying more bakery items in the five years since the Great British Bake Off started in 2010. We munched our way through 780 million sweet bakery servings during the year ending September 2015 – that’s 76 million (around 11%) more than five years ago. The figure for dessert servings is 677 million – some 7.4% more than five years ago. Our appetite for cakes was especially keen with over 406 million servings in the year ending September 2015, while our appetite for brownies is shooting up too with servings jumping 72% to 149 million in the same year.” Bakery shops have seen little growth overall in sales of sweet bakery and dessert items over the past five years. While the total market grew 9.2% over the past five years in terms of servings, bakery shops only increased business by 2.5% over the same period. Bakeries even faced a 3.1% decline in servings in the year ending September 2015, compared to the previous year. Bakers face strong competition from other suppliers, in particular high-street coffee shops, which notched up 186 million servings of sweet bakery and dessert treats for the year ending September 2015, 8.9% more than the previous year.