Dublin, May 11, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The "The Future of EU Online Grocery 2021: Ultra Fast Deliveries, Aldi/Lidl Going Online, D2C" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.
Akin to the situation in physical online grocery, where several channels coexist, such as hypermarkets, supermarkets, discounters, convenience stores, organic specialists, this will probably be mirrored by online grocery concepts. And maybe even price segmentation will set in between them.
While in the more mature markets the weekly shop is on the whole served well in the online channel through the big multichannel retailers with next day (or later) deliveries, the more immediate shopper missions had not been on the agenda prior to COVID-19. This has changed, the Instacart clones (basically a third party pick and delivery service) had an outstanding 2020 (the grocery divisions of deliveroo, Uber Eats, everli and glovo). But these players are now being disrupted by a new breed of online grocery players which are all about speed and convenience, the rapid convenience store delivery apps such as Getir, Dija, Weezy, Gorillas, Jiffy and Zapp.
The ultra-rapid players have their own mini dark stores/depots in urban catchments and cut out the retailers for sourcing products. The hyperlocal nature of their business model enables them to pick for and reach customers' households within 10-15 minutes, in many cases being quicker than the shopper going to the store themselves. In the right circumstances such as a distressed shop late at night for OTC products, essential ingredients or the like this can be a very attractive offer.
Following the model of US start-up goPuff, these players are trying to become global champions. Most of the other players are to various degrees copying the goPuff business model, even though the US player was not the first to come up with local hubs. And currently, this is where all the hot investment and start-up money is flowing. The promise to capital markets/PE/investor community is to build a truly global grocery business (where all the traditional players have failed) because the model is easily replicable any and everywhere and so it becomes a flag planting exercise and race for market share (just like the meal delivery apps). To guarantee the ultra-rapid delivery times the business model needs to be necessarily urban though.
While there are many unanswered questions, mainly around profitability, for many shopping missions especially in the bigger cities this is probably the future of delivery, after all, no one wants slower deliveries and once the infrastructure is in place on the front and back end (the logistics set up and the riders) a lot of other services can ride on this too. Other big unanswered questions apart from costs/profitability are whether there are scale benefits, as 10 minutes implies that this is a point-to-point play in logistics. One simply cannot group trips into the catchment, if the rider has to be on the individual shopper's front door with a 10-minute window.
In certain aspects, the rise of these new app players is a big threat to click and collect - but definitely for the convenience store sector, which so far had been shielded from the online grocery channel shift. The publisher would advise convenience store operators to have a long hard look at this and perhaps to launch their own service or partner up with an external service provider - but this would have to happen on a hyper-local level and is very cost-prohibitive.
Companies Mentioned
- Aldi
- Amazon
- Arla
- Bevmo
- Bring
- Cajoo
- Carrefour
- Conad
- Coop
- Cortilia
- Danone
- Deliveroo
- Dia
- Dija
- E.Leclerc
- El Corte Ingles
- Esselunga
- Everli/Supermercato24
- Flink
- Getir
- Glovo
- goPuff
- Gorillas
- Henkel
- Jiffy
- Knuspr/Rohlik
- Kraft Heinz
- Les Mousquetaires
- Lidl
- Lindt
- Mercadona
- Pepsico
- Picnic
- Procter & Gamble
- Softbank
- Tegut
- Uber Eats
- Unilever
- Weezy
- Zapp
For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/h0aby5
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