Cooking sauces 2025: Brits splash out on herbs and spices

Home cooks have been freshening up their spice racks this year, with an extra £27.8m spent on dried herbs & spices – and the sector’s volumes are up 4.4%, or 865.2 thousand kilos.

“Despite tighter budgets, people are still looking for simple ways to elevate their meals,” explains Scott Dixon, MD of The Flava People. “Herbs and spices are the real crutch that most scratch cooks fall back on. They’re a low-cost way to bring variety and global flavour into everyday dishes.”

Category leader Schwartz has made the largest absolute gain of £2.6m on volumes up 8.9%. In June, the brand added All-Rounder seasonings, billed as “the perfect shortcut to mouth-watering flavour”. They will “appeal strongly to younger shoppers”, insists Caroline Lesur, Schwartz UK consumer marketing director.

Cooking sauces, by contrast, are losing their appeal. Shoppers have bought 4.2 million fewer kilos and the top five brands – Dolmio, Loyd Grossman, Schwartz, Patak’s and Sharwood’s – have lost a combined £9m.

This rejection of packaged sauces is “driven not only by cost-saving motivations but also by a growing desire to reduce processed food intake,” says Lauren Hollis, NIQ senior analytics executive.

Not that every brand has suffered. While those “heavily reliant on jarred cooking sauces struggled, those offering an assortment more compatible with scratch cooking routines were better able to drive both value and volume growth”, Hollis adds.

Take The Spice Tailor. It’s the only top five meal kit brand in growth – up £3.4m on volumes up 12.6%. In July, it added five Mexican-inspired kits, including Smoky BBQ Fajita and Chipotle & Lime Burrito. The latter variant speaks to the “bolder, more authentic flavour profiles” emerging in Mexican meal kits, says Dixon. Such flavours “give shoppers the sense of eating out at home, which is particularly appealing when household budgets are under pressure.”

That goes some way to explaining why Latin American-style brands Las Chicas and Capsicana have seen volumes rocket 26% and 73.1% respectively.

Tex-Mex giant Old El Paso, however, has sold 1.3 million fewer packs.