Post-pandemic Online Grocery Delivery Services: Trends, Challenges, and Empirical Evidence from Germany

Despite growth in online grocery business sales in Germany, the country is still lagging behind its European peers. This chapter analyses the operational challenges to online grocery delivery in Germany before and during the COVID-19. The analysis is based on surveying several resources, such as news and research articles. The analysis is complemented by semi-structured interviews with industry experts. We also compare the challenges and characteristics of online grocery delivery with deliveries in retailing. The main lessons learned are that the majority of the respondents are confident that they will order groceries online in the future. The top chosen reasons for this are comfort, time saving, and impulse buying, while personal safety was not a major reason.