A later Easter last year helped push up sales by 8.3% to nearly £328m. The longer season meant shoppers were buying Easter confectionery 4.2 times on average - 5% more often than in 2016.

Mini eggs received a particular boost from the late season. Not only did they attract more shoppers (315,000 more), but people also bought more often, mainly during early season, and took home more eggs per trip.

Cream-filled eggs and Easter novelties struggled to gain the same momentum with shoppers (volume sales of the former were almost flat at 0.8%, and the latter was down 10.8%). Price inflation made up for the lack of extra sales, though, as they contributed to growth with almost an extra £1.5m each.

Own label boomed last year as all retailers saw growth in the category except Waitrose, whose focus on multibuy promotions didn't pay off in terms of value sales. Frequency, again, was the main contributor to the growth for all, but Tesco, Asda and Aldi also managed to attract more shoppers.

Unusually, the discounters were not the biggest driver of own-label growth. M&S took the lead with an extra £2m in sales, followed by Aldi (+£1.3m). Branded confectionery drove the performance of both discounters and this took its toll on the Lidl own-label range, which saw declines.Total category