Fresh food
(e.g. fruit, vegetables, nuts, meat, dairy)
Packaged food
(e.g. confectionery, biscuits, cereals, snacks)
Hot & cold beverages
(e.g. tea, coffee, fruit juice, soft drinks)
Beer, wines and spirts
The wide range of products within this large sector has a number of things in common if they aspire to market success. These include good taste, indulgence, convenience and health attributes. All food & drink markets have had to reposition themselves at some stage to maintain relevance with their consumers. Searce can help you stay close to your consumers in this rapidly changing market environment.
Sales of food and drink suffer less in a downturn than most other categories due to the essential nature of many of these products. However, like most markets, there are winners and losers.
The shopping landscape for food and drink is changing all the time, driven by new products, changing lifestyles, home delivery, online shopping, direct sales, new retail channels and competition from other categories for how we spend our money.
The Swiss spend more per capita on food than any other Europeans, but France and Germany have the largest markets. Some of this can be explained by higher prices, but this is not the whole story.
The type of fruits we consume is also changing. After a sharp decrease in 2009, fresh fruit consumption within the European Union declined again in 2010, registering a decrease of 9.4% in comparison to the average consumption of the previous five years. Half of European countries remained below or just above the 400g per day. This is the minimum being recommended by the World Health Organization. Greeks, Cypriots, Romanians and Belgians eat most fresh fruit and vegetables per capita in Europe, while the lowest consumption levels can be found in Finland, Bulgaria and Sweden.
