Food and Beverage E-commerce Global Market Report 2020-30: COVID-19 Implications and Growth

Major players in the food and beverage e-commerce market are Amazon Fresh, Peapod, Google Express, Walmart, Pepsi Co, General Mills, Nature Box, Thrive Market, Costco, and Kroger.

The global food and beverage e-commerce market is expected to grow from $14.9 billion in 2019 to about $22.4 billion in 2020. Due to the outbreak of COVID-19, most people are now working from home and in self-quarantine. Therefore, they are preferring to purchase food, beverages and other essential groceries online. The market is expected to stabilize and reach $34.6 billion at a CAGR of 23.4% through 2023.

The Food and Beverage (F&B) e-commerce market consists of foods and beverages online sales and related services primarily for household consumption. The food and beverages E- Commerce market includes companies involved in processing raw food materials/beverages, packaging, distributing them and have an online portal or an application for their sales. This includes fresh, prepared, packaged foods, and alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.

The global food & beverages e-commerce market has been geographically segmented into North America, Western Europe, Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, South America and Middle East & Africa. Asia Pacific was the largest region in the food & beverages e-commerce market in 2019.

In August 2017, Amazon, a US-based e-commerce entity, has acquired Whole Foods, a grocery store chain, for $13.7 billion. This vertical integration allows Amazon to gain more value in the supply chain as it now can capture some of the profit from the food processing level instead of being merely a retailer. Whole foods is a US-based supermarket chain headquartered in Austin, Texas, which primarily sells all categories of household groceries and many USDA-certified organic foods and products.

The Food and Beverage (F&B) e-commerce market covered in this report is segmented by type into grocery delivery and pickup; DTC products, meal kits and fresh ready-to-eat meals; restaurant meal delivery. It is also segmented by by delivery channel into store pick-up; home delivery and by end users into households; businesses.

Supplier and producers cost will be the key restraint for the food and beverage e-commerce market. These include the cost incurred for order fulfillment, delivery cost, adjusting business resources to dynamic market demand and last-mile connectivity. Besides, there are costs of cardboard boxes for packaging, gas, mileage and driver time to factor in. A report from Capgemini in 2019 shows that retailers’ net profit could fall by up to 26% in the next three years, if they don’t radically improve last-mile solutions, despite increased online grocery sales. Since the majority of products have a very limited shelf life, the supply chain has to have no gaps, be robust and have zero resource wastage, to achieve profitable margins. Therefore the costs incurred by the supplier side may restrain the growth of the food and beverage market.

With an increase in technology and changing human interaction with any product or service, online shopping and web surfing for Food & Beverage (F&B) products or services is diurnal. This is positively effecting the F&B e-commerce, in 2019, it’s estimated there are 1.92 billion digital buyers, and e-commerce sales account for 14.1% of retail purchases worldwide and is expected to rise to 22% in 2023. 80% of consumers prefer detailed information about purchases and considered this crucial to make buying decisions. Hence this trend will boost and increase the scope for online food and beverage businesses.

An increase in smartphone users has given a boost to Food and Beverage (F&B) e-commerce sales worldwide. Smartphone users are the primary online shoppers for the F&B industry and with the increasing number of them, there is a potential increase in online shopping for food and beverages. As per an article published by k-commerce, the world smartphone users reached 3.2 billion in 2019 and are expected to grow by 600 million within the next two years and 200 million of these are expected from India and China alone. General Mills, a US-based grocery store chain, is already seeing 10% of their sales occurring online, and by 2022, online grocery shopping is expected to be a $100 billion business. Hence increase in smartphone users and internet penetration is driving growth in F&B e-commerce.