by Freedonia Industry Studies
January 21, 2021
Grocery pickup and home delivery has been available for years. But 2020 was the year these services went beyond early adopter demographics – such as frazzled parents and aspiring ladder climbers too busy to muck about the supermarket – and reached the mass market, as shoppers sought to minimize potential exposure to COVID-19.
As much as customers appreciate pickup and delivery alternatives, they are a trade-off. It isn’t the same as going to the store, which allows you to see things that should have been on your list or to consider new items you wouldn’t have looked for online. While ordering paper towels and canned pinto beans is pretty simple, it’s less easy to get bananas exactly as ripe as you need or the perfect cut of beef for a recipe you want to try. And even if your order contains nonperishables like canned soup and breakfast cereal, both pickup and delivery tend to be time-specific (well, maybe not exactly specific, but there are windows, and usually you need to be home for grocery deliveries from local stores.)
Walmart and partner HomeValet may be addressing some of those issues with a new service allowing for anytime deliveries to homes outfitted with HomeValet’s smart box and app. With freezer, cooler, and ambient temperature compartments, the box allows for groceries to be delivered at any time while remaining secure and at the proper storage temperature.
The HomeValet box and service allow for more convenient deliveries and could expand the list of items shoppers will purchase without entering the store. And while you may want to make that trip to choose the beef tenderloin worthy of an anniversary celebration, it could be just right for bags of frozen vegetables, packages of bacon, and loaves of the only kind of bread your kids will eat.
This development is also part of companies such as Walmart beginning to map out their way in a post-pandemic world. Someday, most members of a household will be back at school and working away from home, but they will still want to maintain new shopping habits and take advantage of the convenience offered by online grocery shopping and home delivery.
This market of potential customers is substantial too. According to The Freedonia Group’s National Online Consumer Survey (conducted November – December 2020), 29% of respondents noted they had used a grocery store’s own delivery services for the first time because of the coronavirus pandemic and 35% used grocery store curbside pickup for the first time. Additionally, 30% of respondents noted they were using third-party grocery delivery services (e.g., Instacart and Shipt) more because of the coronavirus pandemic.
For more information and discussion of opportunities, see The Freedonia Group’s extensive collection of off-the-shelf research, including Protective Packaging, Commercial Refrigeration Equipment, Global E-Commerce Packaging, and Global E-Commerce, as well as titles from our sister publisher Packaged Facts, including U.S. Food Market Outlook 2020: Home Cooking, Grocery Shopping, & Food Trends in the Age of Coronavirus; U.S. Beverage Market Outlook 2020: Grocery Shopping & Personal Consumption in the Coronavirus Era; Global Food E-Commerce; and Online Grocery Shopping. Freedonia Custom Research is also available for questions requiring tailored market intelligence.