FMI — The Food Industry Association has released its annual U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends report, which extensively tracks consumer grocery shopping habits. Prepared by The Hartman Group, the 2020 report provides a clear picture of grocery shopping habits before the pandemic and attitude shifts that took place during COVID-19 plus a glimpse of what might come next for the food industry. Insights from the report were recently discussed in the first of a series of webinars (U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends Report Overview June 10, 2020), details of which were reported in Supermarket News: 

“‘Never before in the recent past of our nation have we been forced to confront the magnitude of abrupt changes that COVID-19 circumstances foisted upon us all,’ David Fikes, executive director of the FMI Foundation, said in a webinar Wednesday on the U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends study. ‘So the food industry — an industry that over the past few decades has become quite accustomed to confronting and addressing disruptions — suddenly found itself facing unprecedented disruption.’”

As cited in the same article, The Hartman Group’s David Feit, Vice President of Strategic Insights, said in the webinar, “At first, people were multisourcing as they stocked up and were trying new things. Now they’ve settled into more of a routine … Relatively few people say that they no longer shop in-store at all.” Supermarket News noted that “Besides changing where they shop, Americans also have changed how they shop, Feit pointed out. Nearly nine in 10 respondents (89%) said they shop differently because of COVID-19. Changes include 44% spending more money on each visit, 32% speeding up shopping trips, 25% narrowing the range of items purchased, and 16% spending more money online. ‘They’re making more efforts to minimize the number of trips,’ Feit said. ‘It’s probably a mistake to consider these neatly as stock-up trips because from the shopper’s perspective it’s a break from the rhythms of stock-up and fill-in, fill-in, fill-in. It’s more like going out of their way to avoid the fill-in trips and getting it all done at once. Overall, the picture we have is a very functional, planful, directed shopping — not at all the exploratory mode of browsing and deciding.’”

For FMI’s U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends 2020 analysis, webinar series, and related COVID-19 Trend Trackers, visit FMI.org/GroceryTrends. A second webinar based on insights derived from the Grocery Shopper Trends 2020 study will be conducted on June 24, 2020. Registration for the webinar, “How COVID-19 Is Reshaping Online Shopping,” is available here.