Magazine: Spaniards like supermarkets

With its 45-million population, Spain is on of FMCG retail’s ‘Big Five’. Economic recession hit the country the hardest in the second quarter of 2009. In 2010 food retail in Spain made the country belongs to the group of eight countries where sales were growing in the second quarter of 2010 in both volume (+3.4 percent) and value (+1.9 percent) – compared with the level of April-June 2009. Elena Alonso, the marketing director of Nielsen Spain told us that in Spain the most important retail channel is supermarkets: 60 percent (up 3 percentage points) of Spanish households spend the most money in supermarkets. Hypermarkets are the second most popular (29 percent – down 4 percentage points – spend the most money there).

Mercadona, a supermarket specialist, is the market leader of Spanish FMCG retail, followed by the Eroski Group, the El Corte Ingles Group, the Auchan Group and Lidl. The high penetration of fresh food shops (bakeries, fruit-vegetable shops and butcher’s) is a Mediterranean characteristic: the average Spanish consumer goes to the baker’s 18 times a month and only 10 times to the supermarket. The average FMCG price was 1.5 percent lower in the second quarter than in the same period last year.

Villányi Ágnes