Grocery shopping has changed. Granted, there are new food products and flavors, varieties and packages for seemingly every taste and preference on the shelves, but the groceries themselves are one thing. How you get them, from selection of items to paying for them to getting them into your cupboards at home, has changed dramatically. Taking some liberty with an oversimplification here … we used to go to the store to get groceries. Now, we do not need to go to the store; we have options for using an app, website, a third-party website that will facilitate the shopping and delivery, Amazon, or a multitude of other online and/or brick-and-mortar turned online retailers. And that’s just for selection.

When it comes to how food gets into your home, you have in-store pickup, curbside pickup, delivery by the retailer, delivery by a third-party, and/or delivery via mail. This diversification in the final mile of food getting to households was underway long before 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally altered how we shop and get goods, including groceries, and accelerated these changes. Even our assessment of our food purchases has evolved with online procurement now facilitating reviews for grocery items that other shoppers can use to make decisions.

We asked 929 U.S. residents about their online shopping habits and preferences in January of 2021. We’ve quantified the online grocery shopping habits by type and frequency, finding use of different delivery methods varied in the time period studied, which was January 2020 – January 2021.

Notably, the time period studied includes 10 months of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and respondents were surveyed immediately following the 2021 winter holiday season during which there were significant impacts on our behavior and well-being due to the pandemic.

While we’ve captured use of online grocery shopping at a particularly tumultuous point in time (January 2021), the real interest is in the changes in consumer behavior over time. Given the rapid changes experienced in 2020, 2021 and continuing in 2022, the real question is about shopping intentions in the future. We found that 45% of our 929 respondents indicated they would be shopping for groceries online in the coming year. Next week we’ll find out why they want to keep buying online and dive into why the other 55% do not.

ConsumerCorner.2022.Letter.10