The absence of riots across the UK’s major cities alongside the impact of the Olympics in London combined to boost sales for the UK’s largest restaurant and food-led pub companies according to the latest Coffer Peach Business Tracker.   The Tracker suggests that sales across the country as a whole were up by 2.1% on a LfL basis but that this split between a 5% rise inside the M25 and a 1% rise elsewhere in the country.

More on August sales: The numbers accord with comments from a number of operators that the second week of the Olympics (which fell into August) was better (or in some cases less bad) than had been the first week.   The closing ceremony impacted (negatively) a Sunday night (in August) whereas the opening ceremony had hit a Friday (in July).   The Olympics performance, which was said by many to have been negative other than in a relatively small number of venues, was very difficult if not impossible to disentangle from the impact of the riots in 2011, which hurt sales.

Disaggregating the data: Peach once again suggests that pubs outperformed restaurants.   It maintains that London pubs, which would also have benefited from the soft-riot-impacted 2011 comps, saw sales rise by 7%.   Casual dining chains in the Capital saw sales rise by only 2.8% which ‘at least reversed a recent trend of falling LfLs inside the M25’.