Swiss sugar confectionery industry: positive export business and stagnating domestic market

Hard sweets (+ 7.9%), sugar-coated sweets (+ 7.8%), “other moulded confectionery” (+ 5.2%) as well as jelly sweets and gumdrops (+ 2.9%) recorded positive growth rates. Only soft sweets (- 17.3%) declined in terms of turnover. The share of sugar-free products grew by 4.8%.

Domestically, companies in the Swiss confectionery industry sold 5,859 t or 0.4% less in 2017 compared to the previous year. This resulted in a 1.4% turnover decrease to CHF 86 m, following a decline in turnover by almost 8% recorded in 2016. While the quantity of imported confectionery decreased by 1.7% last year, the market share at 77.3% continued to remain on a very high level. Overall, (total of local and imported confectionery) 1.4% less goods were sold in Switzerland. From the domestic confectionery consumption, an average per-capita consumption of 3.05 kg per year can be derived, which is almost 75 g less than the previous year. The proportion of sugar-free items equaled 19.3% and remained almost on the previous years’ level of around 20%.

Export business saw a sales volume of 29,991 t, corresponding to 7.3% more confectionery sales than the previous year. The CHF 277 m in revenue generated from this rose by 8.0%. 59.3% of exported confectionery were sugar-free products. The export share of overall production amounted to 83.7%. 96 countries were supplied with Swiss confectionery in 2017, with the USA (export share of 24.0%) now ranking first on the list of export destinations, followed by Germany (22.2%), France (10.2%) and Spain (+ 7.4%). Additional volumes were chiefly exported to the USA (+ 29.3%), Canada (+ 39.0%, number 7 export destination), and France (+ 14.3%), while sales volumes in Italy (- 7.0%, position 5), the Netherlands (- 4.3%, position 6) and Finland (- 58.9%, positon 31) declined.