In 2016 the grocery market in Poland grew 3.8% year-on-year, arriving at PLN 253.8bn. In the same period the discount and convenience segment expanded at a more than twice higher rate. The forecasts presented in PMR’s latest report “Grocery retail market in Poland 2017” indicate that this trend will continue at least until the end of the period covered by those projections (the years 2017-2022).
Robust sales growth in those segments will be driven by changes in consumer habits as Poles have been increasingly preferring to make smaller and more frequent purchases at stores located close to their homes or work places rather than to visit hypermarkets once a week. Consumers also more and more often choose to buy a larger number of products, also other than grocery, at discount stores which is facilitated by the expanding offers of such outlets. It is no accident that the two stores visited by PMR’s respondents most frequently are Biedronka and Lidl where, respectively, 61% and 29% of the surveyed consumers do their shopping on a regular basis.
Changes in consumer habits also contribute to the rapidly growing popularity of convenience stores. This is a specific type of small grocery stores designed first of all with the centres of big cities in mind. They are open for a longer time, they have a gastronomic offering and provide other services, e.g. customers may pay their bills at such outlets. Convenience stores will be gaining thanks to changes in consumption characteristics (consumers not having time to prepare meals on their own, using ready-made meals and gastronomic offering) as well as to demographic changes (a rising number of small, even single-person households) leading to customers buying smaller quantities of products.
The perception of the convenience format as holding a significant potential for the future is also confirmed by the fact that at the beginning of 2017 the leader of that segment, Zabka Polska (the owner of the chains Zabka and Freshmarket) became a hero of the biggest acquisition in the history of the grocery market, with a value estimated at €1.1bn. It should be also emphasised that virtually every major player on the grocery market has tested or plans to test the convenience format. The year 2016 also showed what the direction of changes in that segment will be – practically all the players chose to expand their gastronomy and ready-made meal offering.
Bartosz Bolecki
Retail Market Expert
