According to our own recent ecommerce statistics, food is the second most commonly bought item online (after clothing).
It’s easy to see why. Online is convenient, for a start. In addition, you can bag deals and discount codes (personally a big fan of a Japan Centre discount voucher at Latest Deals). And you can find incredibly niche and specialist foods that you simply don’t get in your local Tesco.
Over a third of people in the UK have made an online food purchase in the last year alone.
But it’s not just big online supermarkets capitalising. The boom in online only supermarkets and niche food ecommerce is notable.
The Covid Effect
Of course, Covid lockdowns played a huge part in this. As millions of us experienced the pain of queuing up outside supermarkets, millions more of us took to buying our groceries online.
The Demand for Online Supermarkets
We only need to take a quick look at Google Trends history for online supermarkets to see the impact Covid had:
No prizes for guessing when we all got locked down!
All of the major supermarkets saw demand growth for delivery services.
But it’s not just the big supermarkets people use
Specialist Supermarkets
Data from kwfinder.com, which estimates how many times given keywords are searched in Google by month, shows an increasing trend in searches for niche supermarkets online.
We took a look at searches for various types of specialist supermarket online in May 2021 and again in May 2024 to look at the change. Here’s what we found:
| Keyword | Estimated Number of Searches in Google UK Per month |
| Japanese supermarket | 4100 |
| Chinese supermarket | 51600 |
| Asian supermarket online | 1200 |
| japanese supermarket online | 190 |
| vegan groceries online | 300 |
| jamaican supermarket | 240 |
| spanish supermarket | 1700 |
| indian supermarket online | 1000 |
| indian grocery online | 1500 |
| greek food store online | 180 |
| korean supermarket online | 570 |
| korean grocery online | 570 |
And this is an exceptionally small sample of keywords.
But what it shows is that as well the big supermarkets, people do want to shop with specialist supermarkets online too. Online shopping affords the option of easy price comparison and access to a wider array of goods. And with so many independent online supermarkets around, it’s possible to shop smaller and support smaller businesses.
Other Key Online Food Shopping Statistics
Other fast facts:
- Before Covid, just 10% of grocery shopping was done online. It rose to 16% during the pandemic and has since settled at 13%. Source
- 12.9% of Tesco’s sales are online Source
So without a doubt, online food shopping is on the up. And while Covid played its part, the effect is much longer term than the Pandemic.
