Business
What the UK bought in 2025 – from bucket hats to Labubu toys
.jpg?trim=0,0,0,0&width=1200&height=800&crop=1200:800 "What the UK bought in 2025 – from bucket hats to Labubu toys")
Bucket hats, strawberries and cream sandwiches, and Greggs sausage rolls drenched in KFC gravy defined British consumer spending this year.
We explore the nation’s purchases, month by month.
January
An average temperature of 3C as well as Storm Eowyn bringing 100mph winds and a danger to life to the UK has consumers largely staying indoors. Spending on digital content and subscriptions increased 8.3 per cent year-on-year and growth in spending on takeaways hit a year-long high of 5.1 per cent, according to Barclays.
However, alongside this, online purchases of exercise equipment rise by 60 per cent on the month before, according to Adobe, while spending on supplements including multivitamin powders and pills increases by 26 per cent and sales of fruit and vegetables rise by 24 per cent.
February
More than a quarter of UK adults (27 per cent) plan to focus more on healthy eating as the warmer weather approaches. One in three (30 per cent) say they are paying closer attention to ingredient and nutrition labels and a fifth (22 per cent) have considered, or are already growing, their own fruit and vegetables at home.
This comes as 27 per cent say they are more likely to visit shops and restaurants that offer “healthier” options, increasing to 45 per cent of those aged 18-24. Sought-after alternatives include zero-sugar treats (33 per cent), organic or whole foods (29 per cent) and low or no alcohol drinks (24 per cent).
March
Easter eggs have gone up in price by as much as 50 per cent on last year while shrinking in size, according to Which? – the result of the price of chocolate rising by 16.5 per cent in a year.
Women experiencing perimenopause and menopause are spending an average £1,800 a year on products such as vitamins and smart watches to combat symptoms such as fatigue and hot flushes, a survey suggests.
Some 76 per cent of women are buying vitamins and minerals, 52 per cent have bought supplements and 40 per cent have spent money on hormone support to help manage symptoms, the poll for buy now, pay later service Clearpay found.
April
The so-called “awful April” price hikes combined with high energy costs see the average household facing an annual increase of £1,254 from essential bill rises, according to figures from comparison site Uswitch.
The third consecutive increase to Ofgem’s price cap sees the bill of a typical household paying by direct debit rise 6.4 per cent, an increase of £111 a year or £9.25 a month after it went up by 10 per cent in October and another 1.2 per cent rise in January.
This is 9.4 per cent or £159 higher than this time last year but £531 or 22 per cent lower than at the height of the energy crisis at the start of 2023.
May
The competition watchdog announces that British vets could face a temporary price cap over concerns that pet owners are being ripped off.
The Competition and Markets Authority is looking into the veterinary industry after 56,000 people raised concerns about the sector, including that they are overpaying for medicines and prescriptions and are not being given basic information such as price lists and prescription costs.
Heinz launches a new Fish & Chips Sauce in a rebranding of the classic condiment Tartare sauce.
The food giant urged consumers to think of its new sauce as “Tartare 2.0”, with the packaging describing the contents as “Tartare Sauce” and listing ingredients as including gherkins, dill, salt, parsley and mustard.
June
Consumers begin to grapple with what will become the UK’s hottest summer on record – complete with four heatwaves between June and August.
Waitrose ice cream sales rise by 10 per cent on the year before, while John Lewis reports sales of garden furniture are up 21 per cent on the previous June, while it sells one million of its basic Anyday handheld fans over the year.
The National Lottery sells 18,600 tickets a minute on June 6 at the peak of the record £208 million EuroMillions jackpot draws.
The run of EuroMillions draws lasting more than 10 weeks generates both the highest ever UK sales of more than £550 million and the biggest ever returns to good causes in the history of the game.
Marks & Spencer launches a dessert sandwich filled with strawberries and cream.
The £2.80 “game-changing” limited edition Red Diamond Strawberry & Creme Sandwich is filled with the fruit and light whipped cream cheese on fluffy sweetened bread.
July
Oasis’s long-awaited Live ‘25 reunion tour kicks off in Cardiff on July 4.
The tour sets off a boom in sales of bucket hats, with even John Lewis reporting sales are up 40 per cent in the first half of 2025 in comparison with the same period in 2024.
Tesco reports record fruit sales as consumers seek to stay hydrated amid high temperatures.
The UK’s biggest supermarket says it has seen overall demand for fruit soar by an “unprecedented” near 10 per cent over the month, with berries, stone fruit, kiwis, melons, watermelons, pineapples, grapes and bananas all hitting record volume growth.
The grocer said it had ordered extra supplies ahead of days of forecasted 30C temperatures to cope with expected demand.
August
Greggs and KFC team up to create the “culinary crossover of the century” in the form of a sausage roll drenched in gravy.
The high street food giants worked together for the first time to offer the Greggs sausage roll with KFC gravy, claiming it is the “mash-up the nation’s been craving” and “seriously flavoursome”.
September
The extended hot summer leads to sales of swimwear breaking records at John Lewis, up 18 per cent in September and 28 per cent in October on the previous year. The late summer also saw outdoor cooking kit sales continuing to soar by 42 per cent at the department store.
Fake Labubu dolls – tipped to be a best-selling toy this Christmas – are seized amid warnings they could pose a potentially fatal choking hazard for young children.
Later this month, the Intellectual Property Office says fake toys worth more than £3.5 million have been seized at the UK border already this year, with 75 per cent of them failing critical safety tests.
Of the 259,000 fake toys intercepted at the border, 90 per cent of them – or 236,000 items – were counterfeit Labubu dolls.
High street food chain Greggs announces it is to open its first pub within the Fenwick Newcastle department store, serving exclusive beers and a menu featuring its classic bakes and sausage rolls.
October
Charlie Bigham launches a range of supermarket ready meals costing up to £30 to appeal to consumers balking at the soaring price of dining out.
The entrepreneur’s new Brasserie range of beef wellington, salmon wellington, coq au vin, duck confit and venison bourguignon was motivated by the rising cost of eating in restaurants, the entrepreneur said.
Almost half of adults (48 per cent) in Great Britain have gambled in the last four weeks, according to an annual survey by the Gambling Commission.
The headline figure falls to 28 per cent when those who had only bought tickets for a lottery draw were excluded.
Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl goes on sale, in which she writes about her three alleged sexual encounters with the then Prince Andrew.
TGJones, formerly WHSmith, reports sales of the memoir increasing every day since its launch on October 21. The retailer said it was selling three times as many copies of the book as it predicted it would.
November
The Classic Bagel from London’s Papo’s Bagels is named Deliveroo’s most popular order among any of its worldwide operations, according to the firm.
Papo’s, an independent, family-run bagel kitchen, was the most ordered takeaway on Deliveroo this year with its Classic option, which combines smoked salmon, cream cheese, sliced red onion, tomatoes and capers.
Consumers learn fresh British-grown strawberries will be widely available to buy this Christmas after a firm extended the season to 12 months with new technology.
The Summer Berry Company, one of the UK’s leading fruit producers based near Chichester, is now growing British strawberries at a commercial scale all year round with the help of LED technology through the colder months.
The final of The Celebrity Traitors attracts 11.1 million viewers. John Lewis reports a run on wrist warmers after the show’s presenter Claudia Winkleman wears them throughout the series.
December
High street baker Greggs strikes again, launching its first range of Christmas cards which come with the gift of a sausage roll.
The range – called the Ultimate Secret Santa Surprise – includes a £3.95 card featuring heat-activated ink which, when warmed, reveals a code to redeem a free sausage roll or vegan sausage roll.
The cards come with the option to personalise some of the designs, such as by adding a loved one’s face to a sausage roll.
Consumers learn Christmas dinner will cost a few pence less than last year in some rare good news for household budgets.
A turkey and all the trimmings for four will cost an average £32.46 this year, slightly down on last year’s £32.57 – which was up 6.5 per cent on the year before, according to market research firm Worldpanel by Numerator, formerly Kantar.
Tesco announces it is giving away ‘wonky’ Christmas trees to help the nation embrace “the parts of Christmas that aren’t always perfect but are still just as wonderful”.
Sarah has now got her money back but there are calls to reform the deadline for reporting scams to banks.
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Business
Pharma bets a little-known form of cholesterol will underpin its next blockbuster heart drugs
Pharma thinks it’s found the next frontier in preventing heart attacks.
Novartis, Amgen and Eli Lilly are among the drugmakers betting that slashing levels of a particularly bad form of cholesterol could deliver the next blockbusters in cardiology. All three of the pharmaceutical giants are in late-stage trials to test whether drugs that cut Lp(a) can protect people from heart attacks.
If they can, the opportunity could be massive: an estimated one in five people worldwide have elevated Lp(a), and there’s not much they can do to lower it. Evidence from human genetics suggests the idea could work, but drugmakers don’t know for sure. That makes the first late-stage trial results from Novartis, expected later this year, important for the entire pipeline.
“History has taught us you can’t make assumptions,” said Dr. Steve Nissen, chief academic officer of the Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at Cleveland Clinic who is the principal investigator of Novartis’ Phase 3 Horizon trial of pelacarsen, the company’s experimental drug to lower Lp(a). “We thought raising HDL would be beneficial and that didn’t work, so I think we have to keep an open mind.”
Lp(a), or lipoprotein(a), was first discovered in 1963. It’s a more dangerous cousin to the well-known LDL cholesterol because it simultaneously clogs arteries and promotes blood clots, posing two risks with just one particle. Almost 50 years after Lp(a) was discovered, researchers found that people who have high levels of it had a more than twofold higher risk of heart attack than those who don’t.
How much Lp(a) a person has circulating in their body is almost entirely determined by their genes. Lifestyle factors like diet and exercise don’t influence Lp(a) levels like they do LDL levels, leaving people with few good options to reduce it.
Currently, doctors encourage people to focus on the factors they can change, such as lowering their LDL cholesterol, decreasing blood pressure, treating obesity and diabetes and exercising. Those strategies can help protect people from high Lp(a) for some time, Nissen said. New medicines could treat people for a longer time.
Novartis, Amgen and Lilly have already proven their experimental drugs slash levels of Lp(a) by more than 80%. Now, they will need to show that translates into tangible benefits. If that happens, the drugs could reach annual sales of $5.6 billion by 2032, according to consensus estimates from Evaluate, a pharmaceutical commercial intelligence firm.
“We don’t know how much you have to lower levels,” Nissen said. “We don’t know how high you have to be to benefit from getting your level lowered. Estimates of how much you have to lower levels to prevent events based upon genetic studies are highly variable, so we don’t have an answer, and we won’t have an answer until on the date that we unblind the trial.”
That should happen around the middle of the year, Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in February. The trial is studying whether Novartis and its partner Ionis’ drug pelacarsen prevents outcomes like heart attacks and strokes in people with elevated levels of Lp(a) who already have cardiovascular disease. Novartis delayed the readout by a year because people weren’t experiencing events as quickly as the company expected in the yearslong trial.
Narasimhan has said that might have to do with the fact that researchers were managing participants’ other risk factors. He said Novartis is still excited to see the data and to potentially create “an entire new class of medicines that can help a whole group of patients that have no other option.”
Novartis’ drug uses a different mechanism than its next closest competitors from Amgen and Lilly. Those drugs, Amgen’s olpasiran and Lilly’s lepodisiran, looked more potent in mid-stage trials, leading to larger Lp(a) reductions.
Amgen’s pivotal trial results were expected later this year or early next before the company also pushed back the timeline. The company now says it plans to provide an update on timing in early 2027.
Jay Bradner, Amgen’s executive vice president of research and development, said it’s impossible to say why it’s taking longer for enough people to have heart attacks to analyze the results without seeing the data.
“The clarity of the signal from population genetics and the encouraging signs from [earlier trials] render this a very smart bet,” said Bradner. The forthcoming results from Novartis will provide direction on how Lp(a)-targeting drugs can affect clinical outcomes, he said, adding that he’s “very bullish about the hypothesis.”
Lilly expects to share data from its Phase 3 trial of lepodisiran in 2029. All of the trials are designed slightly differently, which could create variation in the results, said Dr. Michelle O’Donoghue, a cardiologist at the Mass General Brigham Heart & Vascular Institute and the principal investigator of Amgen’s Ocean(a) trial of olpasiran.
“So there’s reason to think that the magnitude of the benefit might be different across the different programs,” she said.
Despite the focus from drugmakers, few doctors test their patients’ Lp(a) levels. Less than 1% of adults were tested for it in the U.S. in 2024, and testing was concentrated in a handful of states, according to one study of electronic health records.
Screening involves a routine blood draw like what’s used to measure other types of cholesterol. Leading cardiology organizations recently started recommending every adult be tested for Lp(a) at least once in their life. Currently, some doctors are reluctant to screen people for a problem when they don’t have any medicines to offer them to treat it, Nissen and O’Donoghue said.
The Family Heart Foundation plans to advocate for adding Lp(a) to the standard lipid test that measures other types of cholesterol like LDL, said the organization’s CEO, Katherine Wilemon. Living with elevated Lp(a) and another genetic heart condition herself, Wilemon has pushed for more screening since experiencing a heart attack at 38 and founding the organization in 2011.
She said the Lp(a) drugs have already helped raise awareness about testing. If the treatments succeed in clinical trials, more screening could follow. Morningstar analyst Jay Lee thinks it could take time to build the market, especially since Novartis’ pelacarsen would initially be used for people with high Lp(a) levels and a history of cardiovascular events.
Amgen and Lilly are already testing whether drugs could protect people with elevated Lp(a) from having that first event. Those results are still years away, with Lilly’s trial expected to read out in 2029.
In the meantime, Lilly isn’t waiting to make more bets. The company is testing a daily pill, and it acquired a company that wants to use gene editing to slash Lp(a) levels with a one-time treatment.
“We’ve got a bunch of shots on goal,” Cleveland Clinic’s Nissen said. “We hope at least one of them ends up in the back of the net.”
Investors are skeptical, said Goldman Sachs analyst Asad Haider. They’re nervous what the delay in Novartis’ trial means for the drugs, and they’re concerned that even if the drugs work, it could take years for them to become mega-blockbusters, he said.
“That’s why this Novartis trial is going to be so important in how people think about the unlock,” Haider said.
Wilemon from the Family Heart Foundation thinks the market for the drugs is there. She sees screening as the most important issue and access as the second one. She points to PCSK9 inhibitors, powerful drugs that slash levels of LDL cholesterol, which struggled for years to gain traction until drugmakers lowered their prices.
But before uptake comes the data — and she said she and the whole Lp(a) community are crossing their fingers Novartis’ drug works.
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