Food in Europe

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.