The Shopper Intelligence survey asks shoppers why they are making purchases. That helps identify the main categories for kids’ lunchboxes. So 7% of crisp & snack purchases are made for this reason, for example.

However, these categories are located all over the store, representing a challenge for retailers trying to corner the lunchbox shopper.

“Co-location of these categories sounds great in theory but it is impractical,” says Jeremy Garlick, partner at Insight Traction.

“Shoppers are used to finding snacking cheese with cheese, Frubes with yoghurt and so on. Changing this will likely cause confusion.”

“It makes more sense to have occasional temporary in-store features to introduce parents to ideas and innovation, partly as a short-term sales driver, but mainly as a long-term investment in the shopper, and in the featured brands,” he adds.

Kids punch way above their weight when it comes to packed lunches. So, when free school meals were introduced for primary school pupils aged four to seven in September 2014, it hit the market hard.

Back then, children aged five to nine accounted for 11.1% of all carried-out meal occasions. Since then, their share has nearly halved to 6.2%. All in all, under-16s’ share of packed lunch occasions has declined from 25.1% in the year to 14 September 2014, to just 18.2% in the latest figures.

The number of lunchbox occasions among five to nine-year-olds has been rising since July 2017, says Kantar. Packed lunch occasions for this age group have risen by 5% in the past year. With under-sevens still entitled to free school meals, industry players say the rise is partly being driven by parents of kids aged seven to nine looking to take control of what they are eating at school.

Sandwiches, rolls and wraps are an increasingly popular choice for kids’ lunchboxes. There’s been a 9.1% rise in their inclusion in packed lunches, bringing their share of occasions up from 67.9% a year ago to 70.6% this year.