May 5, 2020 — Sales of seafood in supermarkets, through e-commerce grocery outlets, and via meal kits continued their strong growth in the United States in April.
Online grocery sales surged 37 percent from March to April 2020 to reach USD 5.3 billion (EUR 4.9 billion), a recent Brick Meets Click/Symphony RetailAI Online Grocery Shopping Survey found. There were also record grocery e-commerce sales of USD 4 billion (EUR 3.7 billion) in March, the research firms revealed.
March 4, 2019 — Amazon’s new venture into opening full-scale grocery stores will force a change in the way fresh seafood and other items are sold, analysts say.
On 1 March, The Wall Street Journal reported Amazon is planning to open dozens of grocery stores in several major United States cities, including Los Angeles, California.
The stores would not be the smaller, 1,800-square-foot Amazon Go concept stores that Amazon began testing last year, but rather, they will be 35,000-square-feet mainstream grocery stores. The larger size will allow Amazon to offer more variety of products – and likely lower-priced items – than Whole Foods Market stores, the Journal reported.
Existing grocery chains should be concerned by Amazon’s entrance into the market, analysts said in the article. Stock prices for Walmart, Kroger, Target, BJs, Costco, and others all sank on Friday, 1 March.
“Amazon has become one of the world’s largest retailers by driving cost out of the marketplace. Food retailers the ilk of HEB, Publix, Kroger, and Albertsons will have the most to lose as they continue to fight for dollars from the ‘middle,’” Steven Johnson, grocerant guru at consulting firm Foodservice Solutions, told SeafoodSource.
Meanwhile, value grocery chains such as Lidl, Aldi, and WinCo will likely have more growth as Amazon enters the market, according Johnson.