It’s no secret that independent convenience has historically been a bit of a data black hole.
While the big research houses fixed their gaze on the grocery multiples, visibility over the thousands of independent shops where the country actually nips out for a meal deal and a cold can was sketchy at best.
We’re on a mission to turn that around. Retail Spotlight has access to a firehose of EPOS data from more than 14,000 independent convenience, pharmacy and vape stores.
So each month we’re going to report on the new products landing in independent convenience, ranked by how quickly the trade actually gets behind them, while the trends are still warm enough to do something about.
The data for May is in. Let’s take a look, shall we?
First, the obvious question: which new products got into the most shops?
Au Vodka took the top two spots, both its new Tango flavours landed in just under a third of the stores we track.
Powerade’s two World Cup drinks followed, then Pokémon’s latest card set. So far, so straightforward.
Except getting onto shelves and actually selling products are two very different things.
And once you look at total number of units sold, the picture turns on its head.
Pokémon Chaos Rising sits fifth in terms of overall popularity (ie how many stores it’s sold in).
However, if you filter that result through total number of units sold, it rockets to first place by a country mile.
And that’s not just first among the trading cards, it’s first place out of every new product that launched in May, shifting 94,302 units and outselling both Au Vodka flavours from half as many stores.
When Pokémon cards land, they do not hang about! Roughly 45 units were sold per store, against Au Vodka’s 18 per store.
That’s the gap that matters. A product can be everywhere and barely move, or sit in a fraction of the estate and fly.
There’s one more thing the headline numbers hide. These products didn’t all launch together.
Powerade Defend had been on shelf since the 2nd of May; Pokémon only landed on the 22nd. More days means more chances to sell, so comparing total units is unfair to anything that arrived late.
Strip time out, rank by units sold per store per day, and Pokémon absolutely annihilates the competition.
It managed those 94,000 units in ten days on shelf, around four and a half a store every single day.
The nearest challenger, Full of £1,000s, sold at half that daily rate despite a fortnight’s head start. Au Vodka ticks along at a steady one a day.
Powerade, for all its shelf presence, manages barely a quarter of a unit per store per day. The badge got it into the fridge. It didn’t get it into baskets.
If Pokémon is the surprise, Au Vodka is the safe bet that came good. Its two Tango flavours led on store count, sat second and third on total volume, and held their own on rate of sale. No other launch was strong across all three. A social-led brand, a nostalgia flavour the nation has firm opinions about, and a single-serve can at around £3: easy to stock, easy to sell, hard to argue with.
Pokémon isn’t the only product punching above its distribution.
Full of £1,000s reached just 9% of stores but sold close to 59,000 units, the fourth biggest total of the month, at a blistering rate per shop.
Even Doritos Mexican Beef Taco, stuck in barely 2% of stores, shifted faster where it was stocked than Powerade did everywhere.
The pattern is worth a category manager’s attention: a modest store count can hide a product selling hard wherever it’s listed. Those are the ranging opportunities, the lines to push into more shops before a competitor does.
“But what about World Cup themed products?” I hear you shouting as Rashford hammers the fourth goal in the net.
Well, despite the World Cup filling May with FIFA-badged launches, and the data is fairly unsentimental about it all.
Powerade, the official tournament drink, won the distribution battle (24% and 18% of stores) and lost the selling one, barely a quarter of a unit per store a day.
The FIFA snacks hardly got listed at all: Wotsits Golden Balls managed 253 units across 73 shops for the entire month, about as faint as a launch gets.
Doritos is the odd one out, in just 2% of stores but selling respectably where it landed, which says the problem there was distribution, not appetite. Mostly, though, the badge opened doors it couldn’t fill.
Blue raspberry has been everywhere this spring, fuelled by TikTok, and it’s the rare case where a social-media craze actually shows up on convenience shelves: Echo Falls Fruit Fusion, the flavour’s standard-bearer, is among the best-selling lines anywhere in our read, with 158,441 units selling in May alone (keep in mind it launched in March though, which is why we kept it out of May’s ranking).
Other brands have clocked the opportunity.
Silver Bay Point brought its own blue raspberry into the channel in May, reaching 3% of stores, and it’s unlikely to be the last. When a flavour catches like this, the launches tend to arrive in waves.
A flavour wave lifts the brand that owns it, and not much else.
Three numbers, three different questions, and you need all three.
Store count tells you who got on shelf. Total units tell you the scale. Rate of sale, adjusted for time, tells you what’s genuinely working, the closest thing to real demand.
Read together they flag two things worth acting on: the dark horses selling hard in a handful of shops, which are worth ranging wider, and the wide-but-slow launches sitting in plenty of fridges without moving, which are a polite warning that distribution flattered them.
Pokémon is the month’s clearest opportunity. Powerade is the clearest caution. You’d spot neither from a store-count list alone.
We’ll be back next month with June’s new arrivals and the same three-way look: what landed, what sold, and what only looked good on paper.
Some launches will earn their hype. Plenty won’t. The numbers tend to settle it long before the marketing does. And if you’d like to see how your own new lines are really performing across the estate, not just where they’re listed, you know where to find us.
A note on the numbers. The figures here come from a read of around 13,000 of our independent convenience stores for May 2026. Popularity is the share of those stores that sold each product. Volume is total units sold. Rate of sale is units sold per store per day, which strips out both how many shops stocked a product and how long it had been on shelf, so a launch from the 22nd can be compared fairly with one from the 2nd. Days on shelf run from each product’s first recorded sale to the end of May. All figures are units, not value.
