Coop report: “Spending review of Italians does not touch food”

The perfect storm could not spare the food supply chain but rather found one of its main epicenters precisely in global supply chains. Today the Italian market seems to show an inflationary dynamics of processed food products close to the double digit, but still lagging behind other European countries (with us a + 10% compared to + 13.7% in Germany or +13.5 % from Spain). At the same time unexpectedly, despite this push in prices, sales volumes held up (+ 7.8% first half 2022 vs 2019), thanks to the hot and long Italian summer, the return of foreign tourism and the capacity of distribution. to impose itself on other specialized sales channels. However, the Italian market is currently the only one to maintain a positive trend in volumes (+ 0.5% against -5.4% in the United Kingdom, -3.7% in Germany, -2.3% in France and – 1.3% of Spain) and this difference as well as the delay in the price increase seems to presage an imminent turnaround. This is what emerges from the Coop 2022 Report. Even in the face of this unfavorable scenario, the spending review by Italians, even surprisingly, activated in other sectors for the first time in decades, does not affect food. There are 24 and a half million Italians who, despite the increase in prices, are not willing to compromise in their food choices and in the coming months they plan to decrease the quantity but not the quality of their food. The cooking time experienced in lockdown also returns; you spend more time preparing meals and are committed to experimenting with new dishes. But perhaps the greatest evidence of the new value assigned to food by Italians is the surprising lack of recourse to a net downgrading of purchases (-0.1% negative mix effect in the first half of the year, which was instead the first response to the difficulties in previous economic crises. . Probably with the worsening of the situation the Italians will have recourse to it again, but currently the cart is no longer the mine from which to draw from to finance other consumption, but a fort to be protected. Perhaps this is one of the main legacies of the post pandemic. At the time the food that we do not intend to give up seems to be above all the more sober and basic, without frills and superstructures; Italianness and sustainability are the essential elements that erode the market from other characteristics in the past more. So foods appear less on the tables. ethnic, the various types of free (gluten-free, without etc), ready-to-eat foods and even bio seems to suffer a stop ta. The share of Italians who define their own organic food identity decreases by 7 percentage points; from 18% in 2021 to 11% today. The leading brands themselves seem expendable, compared to 2019 they recorded a contraction in market share going from 14.9% in that year to 13.1% in 2022 (-1.8 pp), while the MDD continues its advance, with a market share of nearly 30% in 2022 (+2.0 compared to 2019).