Spain's Top Ten best new groceries products of the year revealed

And it shows that new product design in Spain is extremely limited compared to the rest of Europe, with only two Spanish brands having more than one item in the Top Ten.

In fact, another two brands in the list were not even Spanish, but French and British-cum-Dutch. The German store accounts for 79.5 per cent of the market share, with Mercadona and Día% taking 55.5 and 55 respectively and Eroski Supermarkets 32.6 – as opposed to Eroski Hypermarkets with 27.6, just 0.1 per cent higher than Carrefour.

Consum and AhorraMás hold 28.2 and 29 per cent of the market respectively, whilst Caprabo accounts for 21.3 and Alcampo just 17.9.

In Spain, eight in 10 people shop at just 2.1 grocery stores a year, says the Kantar World Panel Innovation Radar.

Two in three new products are not discovered until a customer goes into the store, and Spain is near the bottom of the European heap for innovation in mass-marketed products, with Romania and Sweden at the top and the UK somewhere in the middle.

Conclusions say innovation in Spain is very scarce, poorly distributed and has little success, mainly because of lack of funds to invest in new products and ideas and the fact that most of those which are launched are not available in stores frequently used by the average consumer.

The most 'innovative' product was by the troubled bread-making firm Bimbo, which has suffered strikes and protests in Catalunya over mass redundancy plans, and wins this year's honour for its thinly-sliced low-calorie bread with eight different types of grain, Silueta Thins 8 Cereales.

Second was Lay's Xtra Salt crisps, by the company Matutano, whilst Danone's Actimel Actiguerreros came third.

Gallina Blanca and Hacendado, Mercadona's own brand, were the only names with more than one product and took fourth through to seventh with the latter's free-range chicken and chopped noodle packet soup mix and oriental-style packet noodles from its Yaketomo range, and the latter's 'carrot rooibos cold infusion' and Pasta Mix Snack, crisps made from pasta ingredients.

The rooibos contains a small amount of carrot but is impossible to see or taste – the main flavouring is mandarin orange and, although the drink can be made the conventional way with boiling water, it also infuses just as quickly in cold tap or bottled water, or a combination of cold and boiled, and like tea, can be drunk with or without milk.

Panrico's chocolate-covered and filled doughnuts, or Donuts Mix Cacao, was the eighth-best new product of the year and the French dairy firm Danone came ninth with its Yolado frozen yoghurt.

Last in the Top Ten was Magnum's 5 Kisses chocolate-covered ice-cream lollies, a brand owned by the British-Dutch firm Unilever.