Healthy Eats, Delivered

It might be possible to say soodbye to grocery stores forever. But should you? yee

- Trish Clasen Marsanico

If food shopping always falls to the bottom of your want-to-do list, good news: It's now easier than ever to avoid the supermarket without giving up healthy eating or spending *all* of your funds on takeout. But that wasn't always the case; the market has shifted drastically only in the past five years.

The first online grocery delivery service, Peapod, launched in 1989. (Yep, during the days of dial-up Internet and floppy disks!) And while people raved about the convenience of buying groceries through a computer, and Peapod made over 29 million deliveries, and dozens of competitors like Instacart, Imperfect Foods, and FreshDirect began entering the scene, the majority of food purchases continued to happen IRL. (Case in point: In 2019, only 3 percent of grocery shopping occurred online, according to Bain & Company research.) It wasn't until the pandemic that e-commerce, particularly for food, accelerated at an unprecedented pace. Online

grocery sales jumped by $34 billion in 2020, according to the FDA.

Today, many folks have returned to buying groceries at physical stores. But they haven't ditched the digital habit completely: Nearly 20 percent of U.S. shoppers bought groceries online in 2022, according to a USDA survey. Overall spending per order across delivery, pickup, and ship-to-home grocery services rose by almost 4 percent from July 2023 to July 2024, reported a grocery business analytics firm. And nationwide, grocery e-commerce revenue is expected to surpass $422 billion by 2028, per Statista.

It must be noted that the environmental impact of online shopping is something to think about (see "Digital Downside," below).

But these grocery services will likely continue to thrive for a few modern reasons.

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