Appetite for fresh food e-commerce grows

Tech-savvy young consumers seeking high-quality produce, healthy lifestyles.

While most elderly people in China still rely on their neighborhood markets, the tech-savvy younger generation, particularly those born in the 1980s and 1990s, prefer online grocery shopping.

"After a long day at work, I really don't want to bargain in a wet market or wait in a long line at the payment counter of an overcrowded supermarket. Then online grocery shopping is a good choice," said Shirley Li, a 29-year-old Beijing-based office clerk.

Instead of choosing fast and affordable food delivery services, Li loves whipping up her own meals.

Thanks to e-commerce services and mobile payment technologies, Li can simply log into a mobile app and place an order for groceries online.

These include products like vegetables, fruit, seasonings, eggs, meat and seafood, all of which will usually be delivered to her apartment in about half an hour.

"I am really not that good at finding the freshest ingredients. And I also hate carrying heavy grocery bags back to my home," Li said. "Now I no longer worry about it as platforms offer fresh ingredients, and that makes home-cooked meals easier for me."

Chinese consumers love a little online shopping therapy and just won't settle for anything but the best. In particular, the younger generation's growing appetite for high-quality produce, healthy lifestyles and the convenience brought by the ubiquity of mobile internet technologies are generating an online shopping spree for fresh ingredients.

The size of the fresh food e-commerce market in China soared significantly from 4 billion yuan ($579 million) in 2012 to 139.13 billion yuan in 2017, according to a recent report from the Qianzhan Industry Research Institute. The report forecasts the total size of the domestic fresh e-commerce market will reach 256.5 billion yuan this year, up by 31.7 percent year-on-year.

Qianzhan said in the report that as monthly family incomes increase, people will order more fresh food online. Among families earning more than 30,000 yuan per month, 36.8 percent of consumers will place online orders four times a week, the report said.

Fruit is the most popular category among online grocery shoppers, followed by milk and dairy products, vegetables, meat and poultry, and seafood.

According to the report, China's fresh food e-commerce market experienced rapid development from 2014 to 2015, and then the industry saw a wave of restructuring in 2016.