One of the underrated perks of having access to a genuinely deep pool of independent convenience store data is that it gives you licence to indulge the slightly odd questions that pop into your head on a random Tuesday.
Not the obvious ones about share or rate of sale, but the ones that make you stop for a second and think, hang on, could we actually answer that?
Questions like: where was the very first Cadbury Crème Egg sold this year?
It’s a niche curiosity, granted, but it’s also a perfect illustration of just how granular convenience data can be when you’re looking at it properly. And once the New Year celebrations were out of the way, we couldn’t resist checking.
By just 12 days into 2026, more than 100,000 Cadbury Crème Eggs had already been sold across the independent convenience estate. That probably won’t shock anyone who’s spent time in the channel.
What’s more interesting is how the year actually began.
🥚 The first Crème Egg of 2026
The honour goes to a white chocolate Cadbury Crème Egg (I know, a white Crème Egg – does that count?)
This wasn’t a quiet, token purchase either. The Crème Egg formed part of a £60 basket of 19 items, suggesting a customer who properly welcomed the New Year in-store rather than squeezing in a last-minute top-up.
The basket included RYO tobacco, papers and a lighter, a generous selection of chocolate, jellies, sweet popcorn and cakes, sugar and syrup, pineapple juice to wash it all down, and dog food.
A New Year celebration that clearly extended to the four-legged member of the household.
🥚 Second Crème Egg, different mission
Sixteen minutes later, the Crème Egg baton passed to the opposite end of the country.
This time it was four classic Crème Eggs, bought alongside four alcoholic RTDs. A very different basket, a very different moment, but the same underlying truth: in independent convenience, shoppers build baskets around occasions, not categories.
🥚 Third Crème Egg of the year
Then, at 00:27 in Liverpool.
A Cadbury Crème Egg Bar, purchased with two energy drinks.
Less celebration, more survival instinct kicking in. Another familiar convenience mission, just expressed in a very different way.
These three moments are a reminder of how nuanced shopping behaviour in independent convenience really is, particularly when you look beyond totals and start paying attention to missions, timing, and basket composition.
Being able to see when something sells, where it sells, and what it’s sold alongside gives you a far richer understanding of the role a product plays than sales figures alone ever could.
This is where Retail Spotlight really shines.
By combining accurate, store-level EPOS data across the independent estate, we make it possible to answer questions that most brands wouldn’t even think to ask — and to spot patterns that would otherwise stay hidden in aggregated reports.
Sometimes that insight helps you refine range or activation. Sometimes it helps you understand occasions more clearly.
And sometimes it simply confirms that the New Year started, for at least one shopper in Worthing, with a white chocolate Crème Egg and a very full basket.
With 2026 now underway, you can safely assume there’ll be plenty more questions worth asking.
