Family Time Drives Online Grocery Orders

With the country well beyond the two month mark of stay-at-home orders, it’s no secret that consumers are craving a return to normalcy. And as both quarantine and social distancing measures are being cautiously eased, consumers still mostly confined to their homes are yearning for reasons to break the monotony with their “quarantine crews.” 

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States in mid-March, four holidays have come and gone. Year after year, our network sees small blips in engagement surrounding these small celebration occasions. But this year, small at-home celebration occasions have driven heightened engagement among shoppers who are using cooking, baking and cocktail-making as a way to spice up their staying at home.

And while our network has seen a 62% decline in usership since Easter 2020, views remain 105% higher than the same time period in 2019. And spikes in recipe views within our network of +1,450 shoppable recipes around these annual celebrations in April and May show that shoppers are still using recipes to plan for their annual celebrations. In fact, recipe views for Easter were higher than both Thanksgiving and Christmas, typically the two largest recipe occasions in our network. 

While recipe traffic leading up to Mother’s Day did not spike to the extent that it did on Easter day, grocery ecommerce orders leading up to Mother’s Day did. In fact, our network saw more ecommerce activity on Mother’s Day than Easter. Despite unprecedented recipe traffic on Easter, in addition to increased traffic around smaller holidays like Cinco de Mayo and Memorial Day, Mother’s Day outperformed them all, indicating that what ultimately drives online grocery purchases now is the desire to create special memories around meals with the family.

For many up-and-coming brands with higher price points, typically in the organic and natural category, will need to more seriously and strategically think about brand identity as price-conscious consumers opt for legacy brands that can offer lower prices and wider distribution. Brands that target niche audiences will be traded down and Chicory’s shoppable recipe network reflects that there’s a decline in interest in diets like paleo, vegan, keto, gluten-free and thus, planning grocery orders ahead of time is essential to these celebrations, especially as consumers continue to struggle to find delivery windows with ecommerce orders surging across the country. The occasion itself is a significant driver of what eventually gets added into baskets by consumers. According to third-party audience data collected by Quantcast, 80.6% of shoppers within our network prioritize hosting and quality over frugality during holiday occasions. This indicates that, again, the impulse to create a stand-out meal drives higher-priced or specialty items into grocery carts such as lamb legs for Easter or limes and corn tortillas for Cinco de Mayo.

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