Dairy Crest Regulatory News (DCG)

31 January 2018

Dairy Crest Group plc ("Dairy Crest")

Trading Update

Dairy Crest is today issuing a Trading Update for the nine months ended 31 December 2017.

The outlook for the full year remains in line with our expectations.

Total revenue for the Group was well ahead of last year for the nine month period. This was driven by a combined strong performance from the company's key brands, Cathedral City, Clover, Country Life and Frylight. Together, they delivered revenue growth of 7% for the first nine months of the year.

Cathedral City has delivered another good quarter. We recently launched a fresh TV sponsorship campaign and Cathedral City Spreadable won 'Product of the Year 2018' in the UK cheese category of the world's largest consumer survey award for product innovation.

All of Dairy Crest's spreads brands - Clover, Utterly Butterly, Vitalite and Willow - continued to gain market share. Growth in Frylight remains strong going into the fourth quarter driven by a significant increase in the number of distribution points across the UK. Country Life volumes continued to come under pressure from the considerable increase in the cost of cream over the last year. The cream price has fallen in recent months and Country Life promotional activity will pick up in 2018.

Sales of our functional ingredients - demineralised whey powder and galacto-oligosaccharide ('GOS'), both used in the growing global infant formula market - are progressing well. We continue to research uses of GOS beyond the infant formula market.

Mark Allen, Chief Executive of Dairy Crest, commented:

"We have seen strong growth across our key brands, with Cathedral City, Clover and Frylight performing well and all of our spreads brands increasing market share. I am delighted that Cathedral City Spreadable, one of our more recent innovations, was voted 'Product of the Year 2018' in the cheese category by consumers.

"We continue to build the customer base for our functional ingredients business and we will talk in greater detail about this in May."

Dairy Crest will issue its Preliminary Results for the year ended 31 March 2018 on 23 May 2018.

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