Summer’s critical role in driving growth for retailers and suppliers

Summer 2026 has seen the UK’s retailers and suppliers benefit from the FIFA World Cup, hot weather, and consumers' desire to stay at home for a ‘coolcation’. However, between these and other inputs that are either driving or affecting the industry’s performance, forecasting and planning for summer 2027 have become increasingly challenging. What can retailers and suppliers take as a one-off for 2026, or what should be accounted for in plans for next year?

This article combines insight from our shopper, retail, and consulting teams to provide a total market view on how retailers and suppliers can review 2026 and plan for 2027.

Shoppers’ engagement with the World Cup exceeded expectations 

Annie McGoff, Analyst

Engagement with this year's World Cup surpassed expectations, with 70% of shoppers following the tournament, up from the 59% who initially planned to follow it. 

However, celebrations were challenged by late kick-offs and extreme heat, both of which pushed viewing occasions toward the home and drove demand for convenience-led solutions. In our heatwave research, 33% said the hot weather affected how they celebrated the World Cup, while 54% said they stayed home more than usual due to the heat. Cooling down became a key priority, with 67% avoiding cooking in the heat, while driving demand for ice cream, soft drinks, salads and chilled sides. 

These findings emphasise the importance of building flexibility into seasonal plans. While the World Cup is over, extreme weather is likely to continue. Suppliers must adapt to how it reshapes behaviour. When temperatures move beyond comfortable levels, shoppers will continue to value convenience, hydration and keeping cool over traditional summer hosting occasions.  

Suppliers should plan for multiple scenarios within their strategies. Activation should reflect how weather shapes occasions, promoting BBQs and easy hosting solutions on sunny days, while shifting focus to hydration and convenience when the heat spikes.

The 2026 World Cup also highlighted the value of real-time activation, as successful communications responded to different levels of engagement and shifting shopper needs. For future summer activations, suppliers should align app notifications, offers and social media communications with how shoppers respond to weather conditions in real time.

The World Cup and hot weather boost convenience store sales 

Patrick Mitchell-Fox, Insight Partner

Summer is a critical trading opportunity for all grocery channels, but none more so than for convenience, where good summer trading is as important for small stores as Christmas is for superstores.  

Events can be a great focus for marketing, but in any year hot weather is the critical opportunity for convenience to succeed. Hot weather drives significant incremental impulse spending and also drives day-tripping to locations where convenience stores are often the predominant (or only) format.

For suppliers, supporting the channel to be prepared for and responsive to these spikes in demand is key to winning friends in convenience and gaining the benefit of this opportunity. Essential to winning in this space are:

1. Availability: so think about the convenience routes to market and how important cash & carry (for example) can be for top-up to all small stores at these times; and

2. Pack sizes and product formats: hot weather trade really is ‘on-the-go’ above all.

In the absence of big events, don’t neglect smaller, or more local, opportunities such as the many music festivals that can create seasonal ‘hot spots’ for trade across the country.

Activations will have to improve to benefit shoppers, retailers and brands

Bryan Roberts, Retail Futures Senior Partner

The two foundations of success from this summer’s activations are collaboration and relevance. As we noted in our recent retail media report, relevance is a prerequisite for any activations and some brands, including major sponsors, were struggling in this regard.  

Tenuously mentioning football or summer isn’t really enough these days. Broad seasonal relevance is borderline adequate, but it really comes to life when linked to particular consumption occasions. 

This is where collaboration comes into its own too: joining forces with other brands and categories can create genuine solutions for shoppers and consumers and create commercial uplifts as a consequence. Shoppers have engaged with these propositions this year, so expect to see a repeat next year. 

We’ve seen too many activations this summer that have not benefitted all three key stakeholders: shopper, retailer and brand. There needs to be much more rigour from suppliers who want to win in 2027 to ensure that activations create genuine value.

Grocery retailers need to maximise the occasion opportunity 

Sneha Haria, Insight Manager

The biggest lesson from the 2026 World Cup is that grocery suppliers should focus on creating new occasions, not just selling more of the traditional football categories. While snacks, soft drinks and beer remained at the heart of activations, the strongest examples extended the opportunity into adjacent missions.

Asda, for example, developed football-themed private label meal solutions such as its "Big Game Bake" range, turning the tournament into a convenient dine-in occasion and giving shoppers an alternative to takeaways. Retailers also used event-specific messaging and themed packaging to make products feel more relevant and timely.

Looking ahead to summer 2027, suppliers should identify emerging eating and drinking occasions created by major events and build innovation around them. A strong example came from Sainsbury's, which linked the World Cup to pizza dine-in meal deals and breakfast missions, recognising that North American kick-off times were creating new shopper needs at unusual times of day.  

Rather than relying solely on established seasonal favourites, suppliers should develop limited-edition products, themed packaging and meal solutions tailored to specific occasions. Those that create distinctive reasons to buy around new missions will be best placed to generate incremental growth and maintain momentum against a very strong summer 2026 comparison. 

Understanding the impact of Weather vs Events 

Davey Liddle, Senior Strategic Consultant

This summer has had a good feel-good factor about it, and that is represented in total trade performance. Some will point to the World Cup; others will point to the weather, but which has been more impactful? 

One way to review the impact of a singular event or circumstance is to compare it to previous similar scenarios. Football events are quite straightforward; you can compare your sales data to previous football events to understand how your brand, category or retailer is performing. 

The difficulty is when two sales drivers happen simultaneously: amazing weather and a World Cup run (cut too short). We can use the same methodology. You can look at your performance data in previous similar periods without Football with similar temperature spikes. For example, if your sales increased 7% in a similarly sweltering hot weather period, but during the World Cup it increased 10%, then we can attribute 3% growth to the sporting occasion. 

There are many nuances you can overlay on this estimate: promotion, pricing, distribution, and competitor activity, to name but a few; however, I recommend this as a great starting point for those looking to understand their summer sales. It also works for comparing promotional activity.

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