Sainsbury’s has reported like-for-like sales for its second quarter up 2.9% excluding petrol, with new stores, online and non-food all driving growth.

For the 16 weeks to October 2, total sales were up 5.2% excluding petrol, and for the first half, total sales were up 4.8% excluding petrol. Like-for-likes in the first half were up 2% excluding petrol.

Yesterday, rival Tesco reported UK like-for-likes excluding petrol and adjusting for VAT were up 0.3%, comprising 0.1% growth in the first quarter and 0.4% in the second.

Justin King, chief executive, said: “We’ve delivered another strong performance and grown market share.  New space has continued to perform ahead of our expectations delivering a further 2.3 per cent contribution to sales growth (excluding fuel).”

He added: “We are pleased with our progress in the first half of the financial year. We expect the consumer environment to remain challenging and will continue to work hard to deliver universal appeal through providing great value, great quality products to our customers. Our accelerated growth strategy is providing access to Sainsbury’s winning offer to ever more customers and we are well placed to make continued good progress.”

Sainsbury’s opened its largest store at Crayford last week, and its £1bn relaunch of its Taste the Difference range has had a “fantastic” customer response, it claimed.

Non-food is growing at three times the rate of food, its convenience business is achieving £1bn annual sales and its online channels are delivering sales up 25%.

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