With COVID-19’s home quarantine policy compelling consumers into spending more money on fresh grocery purchase, it also gives consumers the opportunity to ensure increasing penetration of the online segment. With the consumer price index scoring a record high, the fresh grocery retailing market in 2020 boasts a 9.5% year-on-year increase.

As the market in 2020 is unusual given the current pandemic situation, the increasing spend per household will drive the fresh grocery retailing market with a CAGR of 7.6% in 2020-25 while the number of households remains at a 0.5% stable growth year-on-year. In the meantime, online retailer’s growth has slowed in recent years.

Although many online fresh grocery channels are getting publicity and more active client bases, consumer’s underlying motivation to purchase offline fresh groceries has not wavered post-COVID-19, and the area of improvement for online retailers are offline retailer’s strong suits. On the contrary, traditional wet markets are actively innovating to retain younger clients.

This Report covers relevant topics regarding consumers’ fresh grocery shopping behaviour, routines and preference. Fresh grocery products include the following categories that have relatively temporary shelf lives: fruits, vegetables, meat, seafood, ready meals (including half-made ones) and fresh bakery.

Fresh grocery retailing venues refer to retail channels (online and offline) which sell grocery products; on-trade venues (eg bars, restaurants, KTVs) are not included; listed here are the major retail grocery channels. Offline venues are supermarkets, hypermarkets, wet markets and gourmet markets.

Online venues are domestic comprehensive shopping websites (eg Taobao, Tmall, JD and supermarket websites), social commerce (eg Pinduoduo, Xiaohongshu, WeChat retailer), O2O retailers (eg Hema Fresh, Super Species), food delivery platforms (eg ele.me) and fresh grocery ecommerce (eg MissFresh, 7Fresh).