Grocery in 2025: Visitation trends and consumer behaviour
Dive into the data to see the trends shaping the grocery space in 2025 and uncover actionable insights for strategic decision-making in the competitive food-at-home market. Key takeaways:
- Shoppers are taking more, shorter trips to grocery stores.Over the past 12 months, grocery stores have experienced nearly uniform YoY visit growth. And since COVID, the segment has steadily increased both overall visits and average visits per location – even as average dwell times have consistently declined.
- Grocery stores are holding ground against fierce competition. Despite growing inroads by discount and dollar stores, wholesale clubs, and general mass retailers like Walmart and Target, grocery stores have maintained their share of the overall food-at-home visit pie over the past several years.
- Grocery visit share is most pronounced on the coasts. In Q1 2025, grocery stores claimed the majority of food-at-home visits on the West Coast, in parts of the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, and Mountain Regions, and in Florida and Michigan.
- Fresh-format, value, and ethnic grocery visit shares are growing at the expense of traditional chains. And in Q1 2025, fresh-format and value grocers outperformed the other sub-segments with positive YoY visit and average visit-per-location growth.
- Hispanic markets are on the rise. Though the broader ethnic grocery sub-segment was essentially flat YoY in Q1 2025, Hispanic-focused stores recorded increases in both visits and visits per location – and have been steadily growing visits since 2021.
- Smaller formats for the win. In Q1 2025, smaller-format grocery store locations outpaced mid-sized and larger-format ones, underscoring the power of compact spaces to deliver significant foot traffic gains.