Online grocery deliveries have seen a spike recently due to lockdown policies. Services like FreshDirect and InstaCart are getting flooded with requests, sometimes unable to keep up with the demand. Before coronavirus, online grocery only accounted for 3% of total grocery spending in the U.S., with 84% percent of Americans declaring to have never ordered groceries online, as shown in an article provided by Gallup. A survey conducted by Brick Meets Click in August 2019 found 16.1 million, or 13% of households, bought groceries online that month. The firm took a similar survey on March 23-25, finding the number, for the month prior to the survey, had more than doubled to reach 39.5 million, corresponding to 31.% of US households.

Although a study conducted by Google along with Bain & Company predicts e-commerce penetration for grocery shopping will triple within the next decade, distributors with a digital-first approach are struggling to see solid results. This, according to Bain & Company, is due to the failure to deliver a consistently improved experience through the digitization of the shopping process.

People still prefer to pick their groceries by hand and the structure of the buying journey inside of a shop is hard to replicate in a digital environment. These assumptions are backed by one piece of data that can be found in the same report: “While 25% of the consumers surveyed by Bain and Google used an online grocery service in the last year, only 26% of those users, or 6% of all consumers, say they have been placing orders more than once a month”.

This highlights the fact that, even among those who agreed to give online grocery shopping a try, for the majority the experience wasn’t good enough to make it become a habit.

Considering these assumptions, we believe that, despite the temporary spike in online grocery shopping, the service is still too early in its development to affirm itself as a weekly or even daily habit for the majority of the adopters.

Conclusion

Crises represent difficult challenges to overcome but, as repeatedly demonstrated throughout history, they also serve as fertile ground for evolution and change. Will the covid-19 pandemic translate into a permanent change of our food habits?

It could be the case for home-grown food. Consisting of a significant lifestyle improvement compared to grocery shopping, it may lead people that start growing in lockdown conditions to continue the practice after the virus is gone.

It may still be too early for online grocery shopping, as it fails just yet to deliver a significant advantage over in-store shopping.

It is important to consider, though, that the number of people that started growing their own food due to the crisis is lower compared to those who started buying their groceries online. Hence, even though the retention rate for home-grown food may be bigger, the number of people who will change their habit in favor of shopping for groceries online will most likely be higher.

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