Digital food sales advance

Despite the delicate economic scenario, food retail, which has maintained its activities even with social isolation, has explored alternative channels.
In addition to adopting new practices such as the minimum distance between one customer and another in the payment queues and the sanitization of shopping carts to continue with their operations in a safe way for customers, supermarket chains are investing even more in their online shopping channel, via app or website.
Online sales intensified in the Covid-19 period, driven by increased orders, according to the 41st edition of Webshoppers, a study on Brazilian e-commerce conducted by Ebit | Nielsen.
In the period from March 17 to April 27, e-commerce in general showed a 20% increase in new consumers, up from last year, which recorded a growth of 19% in the same period. The sector that gained the most new customers in e-commerce was self-service, which includes food sales, with 31% of new consumers between March and April. In this period of 2019, this increase was 16%, that is, consumers of online self-service practically doubled from one year to the next.
The data are reflected in the online sales figures of large supermarket chains such as Extra and Pão de Açúcar, grupo Pão de Açúcar (GPA), and Carrefour.
Pão de Açúcar and Extra's sales sites grew by 76% in terms of customers and 150% in the number of hits in the first quarter of this year, compared to the same period last year. As a com, online sales account for about 3% of GPA's gross food retail revenue.
"April was higher than March; May, greater than April; and June is bigger than May. That is, the online supermarket channel is confirmed and gets into the habit of many people. It's really a growing demand," says Rodrigo Pimentel, Director of Food E-commerce at Grupo Pão de Açúcar, which includes the Pão de Açúcar, Extra brands and the Pão de Açúcar Adega wine platform. The executive also says that e-commerce tickets are higher. "We observed very high tickets, average ticket five times higher than the store. In e-commerce, the frequency of purchase is high and with extremely high tickets", he reinforces.
Another food e-commerce operation that is showing good results during the pandemic of the new coronavirus is carrefour. "With Covid-19, our e-commerce food literally changed levels. We've had a little more than three times growth from pre-Covid to Covid. We increased our volume about three times," says Luiz Escobar, Head of E-commerce at Carrefour Brasil.
It's not just the big supermarket chains that have recorded highs in food e-commerce sales. Online grocery platforms such as Supermarket Now and Zipp also noticed this increase. Zipp, which had been growing about 15% per month last year, more than doubled revenues in March – the month of quarantine in Brazil – compared to February. "In April we doubled the March revenue and in May we continued to grow as well. We didn't double, but we had a growth of about 30%. From February to today, we quintupled the company's revenues," says Adrian Tsallis, Zipp's partner.