Swedish grocery market trailing inflation, online disappointing

Swedish grocery market kept on growing rapidly with a 7,6% growth both in December and in Q4/2022. Despite the high growth, the grocery trailled the accelerating inflation by more than 10%-points in December. It remains to be seen, which retailers were able to grow faster than the market and whether any retailers were able to match inflation (thus increasing sales volumes). Has Willy’s been able to grab market share? How about Lidl’s growth?

The bigger disappointment in the Swedish grocery market in the last quarter was the online performance. It seems that inflation has hit hardest to the new way of buying groceries. Customers have been retreating back to more traditional ways of buying groceries.

The traditional development of growth from Q3 to Q4 was seen in the online share this year also. The level simply was lower than during the previous years. Home Delivery has been more resilient, dropping only by -3,8% from Q4/2021.

The new post-pandemic level for online grocery retailing seems to be around 4,5% of all retailing. It also happened to be the share of online for the entire year 2022.

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