Grocery Trends: Grocers ramp up ready-made meals as Canadians balance convenience and costs; Grocers doubled down on online grocery shopping when COVID hit. Is it here to stay?
Grocers ramp up ready-made meals as Canadians balance convenience and costs
Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press
Grocers are investing more in the ready-made meal category as consumers balance their desire for convenience with a pullback in discretionary spending.
They’re going beyond rotisserie chicken, pasta salad and turkey wraps to diversify the dishes on offer as they try to capture budget-conscious Canadians.
“It is a good way to drive traffic and also increase the overall basket size,” said Carman Allison, vice-president of business development at NielsenIQ Canada.
“Retailers are realizing they can be a destination for a lot of consumers,” he said, and that they’re competing with restaurants and fast food joints for shoppers’ dollars.
Ninety-two per cent of Canadians have purchased a meal at the grocery store in the past year, said Allison.
“I think a lot of consumers now are realizing that you can go to a grocery store and get something that’s prepared, and typically it is cheaper” than restaurant food, he said, adding that you also don’t need to worry about tipping at the grocery store.
The ready-made meal section of a grocery store these days could include sushi, jerk chicken, chicken korma or breakfast sandwiches. Some are hot and ready to eat, while others are made to be heated or cooked at home.
Coming out of the pandemic, as inflation began taking a bite out of consumers’ budgets, many shoppers turned to ready-made meals at the grocer as an alternative to dining out, said Jana Sobey, senior vice-president of fresh merchandising at Empire-owned Sobeys, and a member of the family that founded the grocery chain.
The meals served as a midway point between the convenience of eating out and the savings of cooking at home, said Sobey.
The grocer saw sales of its ready-made options grow amid inflation, she said, but even as inflation subsided, the growth continued.
She believes it’s a longer-term shift.
Inflation may have stabilized around two per cent, but that doesn’t mean prices are dropping — they’re still up significantly from just a few years ago, and consumers are still looking for deals and being cautious with their spending. The trade war with the U.S. also poses an upside risk to prices, depending on how long it lasts.
Consumers see ready-made meals as being of better value compared with restaurant meals or ordering delivery, said Joel Gregoire, associate director for food and drink at market research company Mintel.
Mintel research from 2022 and 2024 shows an uptick in consumers saying they are buying ready-made meals at the grocery store on a regular basis, Gregoire said.
“It went up from 62 per cent in 2022 to 66 per cent in 2024,” he said.
Canadians spent $3.6 billion last year on meals from grocery stores, said Allison, translating into 420 million meals. They spend on average just $8.55 per meal, he said.
“With consumers, they are trying to cut back, but at the same time, we still value convenience, so we’re willing to pay a little bit more, potentially, to have someone prepare that meal for us,” he said.
“It’s still a very economical meal option when you think about it.”
Grocer-made dishes can fill the gaps in a home-cooked meal, Gregoire said. For example, a shopper might buy a cooked rotisserie chicken, but then buy the ingredients to make their own salad or buy a bagged salad at the store.
“It’s done some of the work for you,” he said.
A rotisserie chicken is a staple of grocery-store meals, said Allison, and drives a lot of traffic to stores. But there is also growth in different types of cuisine, he said.
Sobeys has responded to the increased interest by offering a more diverse selection of meals in its stores, said Sobey, adding the grocer has had a lot of success in particular in expanding its multicultural food options.
The grocer also recently began opening centralized kitchens to take on some of the more complicated preparation and cooking in order to support the grocery stores, she said. One of the products being moved to central production is soup being prepared for Alberta stores, she said.
The soup previously came from a supplier, but is now being “elevated” as it’s moved in-house, she said.
“Now it has no preservatives, no additives. It’s got a much shorter shelf life. It’s done in sort of small craft batches, all while basically helping to decrease cost and up the quality,” she said.
“I think just all of the opportunity that we see has helped us to really double down on that strategy.”
Ready-made meals are also a way that full-service grocery stores differentiate themselves from discount stores, said Allison. Consumers have been flocking to discount stores in recent years as a way of saving money, but there are far fewer ready-made options in those stores, he said.
“I think we’re starting to see this polarization, the fact that if you want staples, and you want some of the standard grocery shopping, you go to discount. That’s the way Canadians have been shopping,” he said.
“And then the conventional side of things still has a huge, huge opportunity to look for those unique products.”
At Loblaw-owned grocer Fortinos, ready-made meals are a big part of the business, said Guido Alfonsi, vice-president of merchandising and marketing for the banner.
Fortinos has been expanding its offerings since its Pane Fresco program launched in 2011, he said.
“It’s definitely a point of differentiation, and it’s a key component of our business that we’re heavily focused on.”
However, Loblaw has also more recently been investing in ready-made meals in its discount stores.
At Maxi — Loblaw’s discount banner in Quebec — the grocer partnered with local celebrity chef Jonathan Garnier to build a new suite of ready-made meals that launched in October. The items, all coming in at $20 or less, include frozen and fresh dishes, side dishes and appetizers, such as butter chicken, cabbage rolls, beef bourguignon and mashed potatoes.
Before the pandemic, the category was already growing, said Sylvain Lemieux, senior director of banner merchandising for No Frills and Maxi.
After some volatility during the pandemic, it’s back on track in terms of growth, he said.
The idea behind the launch was to offer shoppers versatile items that could be used in different ways to put together a meal, said Garnier: like the meatballs, which can be easily added to a pasta.
Dinner has long been the biggest focus for grocers’ ready-made meals, Allison said, but there are more opportunities in lunch and even breakfast as Canadians increasingly go back to the office post-pandemic.
“I think grocers could definitely capitalize on that,” he said.
Grocers doubled down on online grocery shopping when COVID hit. Is it here to stay?
Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press
By Rosa Saba, March 16, 2025
Before COVID-19, it might have been unthinkable to have a stranger picking out bananas or selecting the perfect pork roast for your Sunday dinner.
But the pandemic prompted many Canadians to turn to grocery e-commerce for the first time, as the weekly grocery shop became a source of fear and stress amid society’s widespread shutdown.
“If you asked Canadian consumers before the pandemic how often they shopped online, whether or not you said groceries, it would be a much smaller portion of the general population. And certainly when you talk about grocery, that would be even smaller,” said Lauren Steinberg, executive vice-president and chief digital officer at Loblaw.
“Obviously that changed quite quickly.”
When the pandemic hit, Canada’s biggest grocers accelerated investments in e-commerce as more customers looked to avoid stores, said Lisa Hutcheson, a retail strategist with J.C. Williams Group.
The grocers were already starting to adopt the “click-and-collect” model that had caught on in Europe, Hutcheson said, “and they sort of put their foot on the gas.”
A Statistics Canada report shows e-commerce was a small but steadily growing part of sales at food and beverage stores before the pandemic, going from 0.5 per cent of total sales in 2017 to 0.7 per cent in 2019.
In 2020, the share of e-commerce sales at food and beverage stores jumped to 1.7 per cent of total sales, and in 2021, it was 2.1 per cent.
While comparable data isn’t available for the years that followed, other data from Statistics Canada show online grocery sales continued to grow.
Before COVID, e-commerce brought in less than a billion dollars a year for Loblaw, said Steinberg, compared with $3.9 billion in 2024.
About 80 per cent of that was click-and-collect, with the rest delivery — and of that, mainly through third-party service Instacart, she said.
There are three main kinds of grocery e-commerce, explained Alain Tadros, Metro’s chief marketing officer and head of digital strategy. There’s click-and-collect, where customers order online and pick up at the store; in-house delivery, where the grocer fulfils the order and delivers it; and third-party delivery, where a service like UberEats sends someone to do the shopping and deliver it.
The pandemic significantly increased the desire for all these options, Tadros said.
Digital infrastructure was a key part of grocers’ early-pandemic investments in e-commerce as they ramped up their websites and apps to handle the influx of demand. They also re-tooled parts of their stores to pack up orders.
They also doubled down on delivery.
“We actually put in significant investment behind the delivery model, and then as we got ramped up on the delivery model, (we) started to expand on other types of services,” said Tadros.
Delivery has grown significantly, now making up about half of Loblaw’s e-commerce sales, Steinberg said. Another shift: the vast majority of those are through PC Express — the company’s in-house service (though it uses a third party for the delivery portion).
In a February 2023 analysis from Statistics Canada, authors Salim Zanzana and Jessica Martin said despite the reopening of the Canadian economy after pandemic shutdowns, e-commerce remained important for businesses. Between February 2020 and July 2022, retail e-commerce sales rose by almost 68 per cent, they said.
“The persistence of retail e-commerce sales above pre-pandemic levels suggests that the switch to e-commerce during COVID-19 lockdown periods may have prompted a long-term change in consumer spending habits and retailer operating models,” the authors wrote.
But since the pandemic-fuelled surge in grocery e-commerce, Hutcheson said she thinks it has “definitely pulled back.”
“There are still people that are using it and it certainly hasn’t gone away, but it’s not being used like it was,” she said.
Shoppers may have discovered they prefer picking certain things themselves in-store, said Hutcheson, in particular perishable items like meat and produce.
Inflation may have also taken a bite as shoppers cut back on discretionary spending.
In June 2024, Empire announced it was pausing the opening of a customer fulfilment centre in Vancouver, citing a smaller e-commerce market for groceries than it anticipated when it launched Voilà.
“While the Canadian market has not expanded as rapidly as initially predicted compared to other global markets, we remain optimistic that it will reach that level over time as more customers recognize the convenience and value of online grocery shopping,” said Mohit Grover, senior vice-president of e-commerce for Sobeys owner Empire, in a statement on March 10.
In 2022, grocers saw online sales either decline or slow down as they lapped strong growth in 2020 and 2021, though they maintained sunny outlooks.
Tadros says the peaks of the pandemic were followed by a “normalization” in grocery e-commerce. More recently, in the past year or so, he said he has noticed a resurgence in demand for e-commerce grocery.
On Empire’s third-quarter earnings call Thursday, CEO Michael Medline sounded optimistic about the trajectory for e-commerce, saying sales growth for the category was 72 per cent.
And at Loblaw, “our sales now are higher than they were in the highest of highs during COVID,” said Steinberg.
The company is still looking for ways to branch out. For example, as more shoppers are looking for deals and gravitating toward discount stores, the company has been expanding its delivery capacity for No Frills.
Hutcheson said the grocers have learned a lot from the past five years and she anticipates growth in grocery e-commerce still, particularly as younger generations become a bigger piece of the consumer pie.
This could include digital platforms that help shoppers navigate the aisles, or QR codes to scan for product information, or more local curation in stores based on information from loyalty programs, she said.
“I just think that it won’t necessarily be in e-commerce. It will be in integration, it will be sort of that blend of … online and in store,” she said.