Greene King pub and brewery group announces a record Christmas despite the doom and gloom.

Rooney Anand, chief executive, said: "This was another strong performance driven by the strength of our business and our continued commitment to providing unrivalled value, service and quality to our customers.

"Across the UK, the pub becomes the real heart of the community during Christmas. Supported by better weather conditions than in the previous year, we saw record Christmas bookings and our like-for-like sales in Christmas week were up 17%. Food sales were £1.7m on Christmas Day alone, and we sold 365,000 Christmas meals in December, another record for Greene King."

The Suffolk-based company, whose brands include Loch Fyne, Hungry Horse, Eating Inn and Old English Inns, explained that its overall profit, cashflow and balance sheet remained in line with expectations, but still expect tough trading conditions in 2012.

Greene King Retail saw like-for-like (LFL) sales up 8.2% in the last seven weeks, delivering 4.7% growth in the year-to-date. All major sales categories achieved strong growth in the period with food LFL sales up 11.1%, driving further growth in food's share of Retail sales. In the year-to-date, food LFL sales are up 6.3%. Its three acquisitions in 2011 - Cloverleaf Restaurants, Realpubs and Capital Pub Company - have all traded very well over Christmas

Said Rooney: "Although we expect another difficult environment for the UK consumer in 2012, we remain confident that we will continue to deliver growth and value to our shareholders, driven by the strength of business, our Retail expansion strategy and our focus on offering unrivalled value, service and quality to our customers."