- November 20, 2018

Food in Europe

Alex Gevers
Alex Gevers
Insights Director
Comscore

As we approach the Christmas season, food grows in importance in Europe - at least that's what the data says. Compared with the previous month, time spent on food retail sites increased by 13% in September 2018, to nearly 20 minutes per person per month. The last time engagement with food websites was this high was during last year's Christmas season. This spike makes it clear: Europe is ready to get festive.

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In this report, we examine online trends and behavioural patterns impacting the food sector, using multi-platform data from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK ("EU5").

Insights in this year’s report include:  

  • Across EU5 countries, 130 million Individuals visited a food-related site in September 2018, or 57% of EU5's total digital population. 81% of them visited a food lifestyle site, which provided restaurant reviews, recipes, cooking tips and meal plans. 55% visited a food retail site where users could purchase or have groceries, food and beverage products delivered. 
  • Content preferences of people who used food lifestyle sites differed from those who used food retail sites. For example, food lifestyle audiences had a higher concentration on e-cards and cosmetics sites, whereas, food retail audiences had a higher concentration on other general retail sites.
  • Over half of food audiences tended to be female and aged 35 and above. Importantly, while there are differences noted between countries, the differences tended to be more pronounced within countries between food lifestyle and food retail audiences. 
  • Traditional food retailers are among the list of top desktop sites. On the other hand, the list of top mobile apps consists of food delivery services such as Just Eat, and fast food click and collect services such as McDonald's.

Multi-Platform Content Measurement

Comscore Media Metrix® Multi-Platform provides an unduplicated view of total audience behavior across desktops, smartphones and tablets.

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