Grocery is the least penetrated but fastest-growing category in ecommerce today. Traditional brands and retailers need to understand why this channel shift is accelerating and adjust their marketing and selling strategies accordingly.

Last year, the number of locations offering “buy online, pick up in-store” (BOPUS) nearly doubled among leading US grocery retailers. Walmart (and various third-party partners), Target/Shipt, Kroger/Instacart, Ahold and Albertsons brought their collective number of click-and-collect locations from 2,451 in January 2018 to 5,800 in December 2018, per data from CommonSense Robotics.

The online grocery market is starting to reach an inflection point, but in order to achieve success, retailers must overcome key logistical hurdles.

Even though food and beverage has traditionally been a product category with low digital penetration in the US—we peg the category at 2.8% of all retail ecommerce sales for 2018—online sales are steadily picking up steam.