The escalation of prices and has accelerated the growth in Spain of Mercadona and Carrefour, which together already control more than 36% of the market share. In the last year, the Valencian supermarket chain has increased its participation by almost two points, up to 26.5%, and the French one by one, reaching 9.7% of the total market, according to data from Kantar Worldpanel at the close of the first quarter of the year.
Lidl, specialized in the discount segment and which was until now one of the fastest growing, has stagnated and increased its participation by only one tenth, to 5.3%. Dia and Eroski, who occupy the fourth and fifth position respectively, lose quota; Consum repeats with 3.2% and Alcampo hardly rises one tenth, up to 3.1%.
trade drop
Mercadona and Lidl prevail at a time when their sales of 5.5% compared to the same month of 2021, the sharpest drop since February 2021, when they plummeted 9.5%, according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE).
Food sales in the retail sector fell, specifically, by 0.8% and everything indicates, furthermore, that the falls will continue given the sharp rise in prices. The leading indicator of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the main indicator of inflation, stood at 8.4% in April, 1.4 percentage points less than last month due to the drop in the price of electricity, but with the shopping basket still rising.
In addition to the rise in prices, one of the main obstacles to the growth of supermarkets is the recovery of consumption in the hospitality industry, which little by little is once again reaching the levels prior to the start of the pandemic in 2020.
Large retailers are positioning themselves precisely for this reason in food outside the home and are gaining more and more ground, according to data for the month of March from The NPD Group. Thus, both ready-to-eat dishes and those prepared to take home experienced a 25% increase in that month compared to March 2019, the last year without Covid-19.
Prepared food
In this field, Mercadona also had a vision of the future by strengthening its position with the launch in the summer of 2018 of its section, a section of dishes prepared at the moment within the supermarket itself and which currently has 35 specialties.
Precisely, last Friday the Valencian chain announced that it had begun to implement free service in this section to avoid waiting for customers. The company took this step after testing this new sales model in some of its establishments for more than four months, which will gradually be implemented in the more than 800 stores that have this section. The company chaired by Juan Roig has set itself the goal of making it available in all of them by the end of the year and that the new supermarkets that open with this section already do so with this sales model.
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