U.S. online grocery retail - statistics & facts

Established retailers and successful newcomers

Together with Walmart, Amazon is the unchallenged leader of the U.S. online food grocery market. In 2021, the marketplace lost a few percentage points compared to February 2020. Online grocery services like Amazon Fresh, in turn, gained market share. Walmart’s e-commerce sales are forecast to double the value registered in 2020 and reach 45 billion U.S. dollars by 2023, dwarfing Kroger and Albertsons’ online sales. Grocery retailers face the competition of new players delivering meal kits and ready meals. The food service platform Instacart was preferred by one in five U.S. shoppers and ranked as the most visited groceries website in June 2021.

How do U.S. shoppers buy groceries online?

Although home delivery is the favorite fulfillment method for grocery orders, the preference rate for in-store pickup slightly increased in 2021. Home shipment is particularly more popular for purchases of non-edible packaged goods, while consumers are more eager to collect food products in store. Tech-savvy generations like Millennials and Gen Z constitute important target markets for e-grocery retailers. Specifically, 40 percent of them opted for online subscriptions to delivery services, against 13 percent of Boomers.

A trend boosted by COVID-19 but that will endure

With the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, an unprecedented opportunity arose for online grocery retail to deepen market penetration, as monthly online sales showed. Once experimented, the shopping habit is here to stay, although with differences depending on age and income levels. In 2021, young consumers continued to buy their groceries online, with roughly 30 percent of them willing to shop even more frequently than during the crisis of the previous year. Unlike other categories of consumer goods, purchases of grocery products still rely on desktop platforms rather than mobile applications. Almost 30 percent of U.S. consumers never placed orders through retailers’ apps.

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