The statistics of Christmas sprouts

Christmas statistics, and in particular, about Brussels sprouts, were featured in a recent article with BBC Radio 2’s Steve Wright. Pete Benton, Director of Data Collection at The Office for National Statistic (ONS) was interviewed by Steve and gave this information:

• Supermarkets sell approximately 750 million individual Brussels sprouts at Christmas time, but if you estimate how many are eaten, it’s only about half of that.
• 25% of the whole year’s sprout sales are in the two weeks before Christmas.
• An area covering 3240 football pitches are used to grow Brussels sprouts in the UK – and if you lined all those sprouts up, they would stretch from London to Sydney. 

You can listen to the radio interview or read the ONS article, which covers statistics on many items including:

• Popular Christmas presents
• Who cooks Christmas dinner
• Popular travel destinations at Christmas
• Seasonal baby names