Food & Drink: a slimmer release schedule means a smaller plate
Last year will be looked back on as a bit of a disappointing 12 months for the Food & Drink category in NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market, as 2025 was the worst return since 2020.
Last year will be looked back on as a bit of a disappointing 12 months for the Food & Drink category in NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market, as 2025 was the worst return since 2020. And 2025 only exceeded 2020 by just under £1.6m in TCM value, despite that year missing several weeks of data due to reporting blackouts during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns.
Prior to that, we must go back 10 years to find the previous worst performance, when in 2015 the category racked up £80.5m, 1.3% behind 2025’s £81.6m. This was not part of an ongoing trend as it represented an £11.6m drop versus 2024’s numbers, a total which had been growing slightly since 2021, so there must be something else going on. The Food & Drink: General sub-category is the main culprit: its £40.1m worth of sales accounted for a little under half of the total category’s revenue and is down £10.2m from 2024.
There is some annual variance in the other categories, though due to their size they are having much less of an impact – though it is worth noting that Vegetarian Cookery delivered its lowest result in eight years, of just £4.1m, down considerably from 2019’s peak of £18.8m. It is tempting to think that this dramatic change in the category’s fortunes must be down to the phasing of release schedules of a handful of top titles; it is a sector, after all, dominated by big names that do not always publish a new title annually, nor necessarily at the same time of the year.
That is certainly the case for 2024’s biggest author, Nathan Anthony. His Bored of Lunch series dropped £3.2m in 2025, though that was no doubt down to his one new release compared with three in the year prior. That loss, though, has been made up for by a good year for Jamie Oliver who doubled both his output and his sales value – to the tune of £3.2m.
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But digging in to the data finds a more concerning picture for publishers. The 30 bestselling authors from 2024 have seen their combined sales collapse, like an undercooked soufflé, by £13m. In fact, only four authors from the Top 30 managed to improve their take in 2025: the aforementioned Jamie Oliver, Mary Berry, Emily English and Tom Kerridge (the latter three combining to add an extra £697,480). Meanwhile, 13 of the remaining writers managed to shed more than £500,000 each, accounting for £11.3m of the category’s total loss.
That authors’ list – led by Pinch of Nom creators Kay and Kate Allinson, who have seen their portion slimmed down by £2.7m year-on-year – runs the gauntlet from the likes of the Hairy Bikers to the favourite of Waitrose shoppers everywhere, Yotam Ottolenghi to influencers such as Hayley Dean.
In nearly all of those cases, like Anthony before them, the decline is due to a more erratic publishing schedule, with fewer titles from those authors published in 2025, compared with 2024. This might suggest 2025 was just a blip and 2026 will see a resurgence of the category.
Alas, thus far, that does not seem to be the case, with the first quarter of the year delivering sales that have dropped 15.4%, compared with the equivalent period at the beginning of 2025. That percentage figure equates to roughly £2.9m – £2.3m of which comes from the General subcategory, so the fallow period looks set to continue. Plus, some of the contraction may simply be due to the air fryer trend – which had buoyed the General category in the past couple of years – cooling, as many kitchen gadget retailers showed declines in sales of the appliances last year.
Plus, it should be noted that Food & Drink is a category that benefits from the gifting period: 42% of its sales in 2025 came in the last 13 weeks of the year. With new books from Oliver, Ottolenghi, the Allinsons, Emily English and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall due to come out over the course of the rest of 2026, fortunes may still rise.
Rotating Charts: Food & Drink
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Source: NielsenIQ BookData, Weeks 1-13 2026
In the Spotlight
Tom Gilbey
Thirsty
Square Peg, £20, 9781529951479
The only sub-category within Food & Drink to be up in the first three months of 2026 is Wines – rising 3.1%, following a 13.1% increase in 2025. It is working off a much smaller base: total sales in 2025 came to £1.2m, with only £178,919 added to the tills so far this year. The category is led and dominated by Gilbey’s Thirsty, which accounts for just under a quarter of the sales, though its 2,484 copies is not enough to make it into the overall
Food & Drink Top 50.
TCM copies sold: 2,484
