The online food delivery service is still at the beginning: Daniel Petrat (right) and branch manager Mathias Janßen. (Frank Thomas Koch)
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Shopping in the supermarket without a shopping cart as a distance buffer and mouth-nose protection cover? That is possible, it was already before 2020. Groceries have sometimes been delivered to regular customers by retailers for years after ordering by telephone. Online trading is beginning to take hold, also driven by the pandemic. For a fee, bread and rice, sometimes milk and tomatoes, are brought to the door of the apartment from individual markets and discounters.
This applies, for example, to Daniel Petrat’s Rewe stores on Gerold-Janssen-Strasse and Alfred-Faust-Strasse. “The interest is there and it is growing, of course also due to the pandemic,” says Petrat. The clientele is diverse. Some customers are currently avoiding personal contacts, others generally have little time and inclination to stand in line at the checkout, and shopping is generally too difficult for seniors.
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“So far, we have not actively advertised this offer because at the moment, around the holidays, we have our hands full,” says Petrat. There are a number of regular customers and companies that have been supplied for a long time, but the online business is still in its infancy. At the moment there are technical hurdles and the registration process is time-consuming, at least if the goods are not to come from the superordinate Rewe Markt GmbH in general, but from one store in particular. You can’t just open up this branch of business on the side, says Petrat. “The effort is high, you need the appropriate staff for that.”
Rewe Markt GmbH is one of the pioneers in online grocery retail, Petrat continues. “Technically, this is still in its infancy for independent stores,” adds Mathias Janßen, branch manager on Gerold-Janssen-Strasse, “but improvements are in the works, and if things run smoothly, demand will grow very quickly”.
No acceptance of new customers
At Edeka24 – the online delivery service of the Edeka Group – no new customers are currently accepted. Bremer Edeka stores, however, continue to offer delivery services. The “Bringmeister” from Edeka has so far only delivered to regions where customers are concentrated – Potsdam, Berlin, Munich.
The “Welt” reported in February 2020: “The sale of food on the Internet is not making good progress. The market share of online groceries in Germany is still stagnating at a good one percent. ”The newspaper quotes from a survey by the consulting firm Oliver Wyman. According to this, online sales will increase fivefold over the next ten years, and younger customers in particular are open to online shopping.
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However, crispbread and pasta, canned food and jam can be packed and shipped relatively easily, unlike vegetables, butter, meat or fish. The logistical effort is greater, especially when delivery is not made within a city or region, but through the entire nation.
In 2010, the online retail giant Amazon added groceries to its range of products that caused a stir. 50,000 items were offered, fresh goods were not among them. Stiftung Warentest tested the offer at the time: “The large range proves to be incomplete and sometimes extravagant: Almost all well-known mineral water brands are missing. Customers can order a 0.7 liter bottle of rainwater from Tasmania for EUR 7.90. Amazon mainly sends bulk packs of long-life food and beverages. But why buy a 12-pack of salt if it is not much cheaper than in the supermarket around the corner? “
A modern alternative to the supermarket
In recent years, Amazon has significantly expanded its range and founded the subsidiary Amazon Fresh. Information on sales and the development of the subsidiary – which currently supplies fresh food in Berlin, Potsdam, Hamburg and Munich – is not available, the PR agency in charge said.
The Hello fresh company delivers food including cooking instructions, weighed and compiled for so-called cooking boxes, including sensitive goods such as vegetables, fish and meat. Hello fresh does not see itself as a niche or super premium product: “We are a better, modern alternative to the supermarket,” says company spokesman Martin Becker. The cooking boxes for the German and Austrian market have been produced in Verden since 2016 and shipped from there.
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According to Martin Becker, the business is growing steadily: “Since we were founded in Berlin in 2011, we have now expanded into 14 markets, in which we supplied 162 million meals to five million active customers in the third quarter of 2020.” 5 percent more customers than in the third quarter of the previous year. “With the spread of the pandemic, we have of course seen increased demand, although we have also grown strongly before.” Becker puts sales for 2019 at 1.8 billion euros. “Currently we are assuming currency-adjusted sales growth of between 107 for the 2020 financial year and 112 percent off ”.
This year, industry media reports, an online supermarket from the Czech Republic wants to conquer the German market: Knuspr. It promises: “High-quality food just the way customers want it – always fresh, regional, inexpensive and within three hours on the doorstep”. It is a subsidiary of the Czech grocer Rohlik. Employees are currently being sought; according to the industry magazine “W&V”, the offer is to start in Munich in the second quarter of this year.
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Online grocery retailing will never replace stationary, says Daniel Petrat. There are far too many customers who spontaneously decide what to put in their shopping basket and want to cook, who let themselves be guided by the range – especially when the market offers the opportunity to do so almost around the clock.
Down to business
Grocery delivery in numbers
In May, the Federal Association of E-Commerce and Mail Order (BEVH) reported strong growth in food (plus 101 percent), medicines (plus 87.3 percent), drugstore goods (55.1 percent) and pet supplies (20.2 percent). The association puts sales in the grocery trade at 308 million euros for April 2020. This is all the more remarkable since stationary retail is not affected by the lockdown. “The enormous increases in everyday goods show above all that consumers in Germany value and use online retail as a reliable supplier, especially in such a crisis,” commented BEVH President Gero Furchheim.
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