April 2023

Grocery-anchored retail assets were resilient during the pandemic. This sub-sector adapted quite well to online innovations such as curbside pickup and third-party delivery services. Grocery-anchored centers will remain the gold standard of retail investments.
With grocery-based e-commerce expected to grow by more than 20% in 2022 and double by 2025, grocery-anchored centers will remain the gold standard of retail investment.

More Redevelopment Projects: With new construction remaining cost-prohibitive, retail developers and investors will focus on redesigning and redeveloping existing space to attract more shoppers. This will be especially true in prime trade areas, which are experiencing record-high occupancy levels and asking rents due to strong demand. Some of this redevelopment activity will involve conversions to other uses, such as office, industrial and residential.
Rise of Grocery Stores: The role of grocery stores will continue to evolve. Although food & beverage digital sales are rapidly growing, most of these orders are fulfilled at the store level through curbside pickup or third-party delivery. Grocers will transform their footprints to better suit multi-channel retailing.
Opportunities in Select Markets: Retailers will become more active in tertiary markets that have recently seen an outsized level of net migration, allowing them to build brand awareness at lower operating costs.

92% of all ‘grocery’ sales will be fulfilled through local store(s).
Consumers will still be eating at home at a higher rate for 2021 than they were pre-pandemic.
Many leading grocers have found ways to thrive and continue driving visit growth despite the challenges.
Despite the challenges the grocery sector faces three quarters into 2022, the industry has shown impressive resilience. This white paper takes a closer look at some of the factors keeping the space thriving through the uncertain times.

The average person will visit a grocery store three times a week and spend nearly two hours a week shopping for groceries. An additional 41 minutes is spent commuting to and from the store on each visit. And the most popular time to go to the grocery store is at 12:53 on Saturday afternoons.

PREVIOUS GROCERY RESEARCH REPORTS (2019)

Grocery-anchored assets’ overall stability, their resilience to economic downturns and their relatively low e-commerce penetration rate ensure reliable traffic and sales. This has made grocery-anchored shopping centers a favorable investment class in what many investors perceived as an uncertain retail environment.

This year’s report finds consumers visit a grocery store 1.6 times a week, which is consistent with the trend of the past several years.

This year’s U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends report found that the average shopper visits 4.4 different retail banners in a typical month…
Importantly, we find younger generations are visiting the most food retailers a month. Gen Z visits 6.2 retailers per month and Millennials visit 5.0 retailers per month to meet their household grocery needs.

Grocery-anchored strip or neighborhood centers have suffered fewer vacancies than power centers and malls; they currently boast the highest occupancy rates of all shopping center types.
Online grocery share will reach between 5% and 10% by 2022 and will fundamentally alter but not replace the store.

The news headlines on closings really focus on a very small number of retailers and segments that are concentrated in the mall base stores. As we will see later, 20 retailers represent 75% of the total number of store closings. Instead, store counts are on track to grow by 2,965 in 2019. The areas with the negative store counts are heavily focused on malls, namely Department Stores and Specialty Softgoods.
Food, Drug, Convenience, and Mass Merchants/Warehouses had a 9.5 companies adding stores for every one that decrease stores. 275 companies had net store growth and 29 had net store decrease in 2019.