Blockbuster Category Analysis: Grocery & Gourmet

With millions of Americans ordering to remain home, Amazon is now, more than ever, a lifeline for essentials for millions of people rather than just a convenient option for online shopping.

“Spending trends at the Consumer Retail giant, Amazon, has started to grow in the week ending April 12. Whereas the spending at Walmart was flat year over year( flat with the prior week), Amazon, on the other hand, has seen spending continue to accelerate, growing nearly 44% year over year.” (The Facteus Insight Report on Consumer Spending and Transactions.)

Undoubtedly, the fastest-growing eCommerce category right now is grocery. And all the major platforms are constantly competing to get ahead in the battle for market domination.

“If you’re Amazon right now, you couldn’t have caught a better break,” Kahan, of Birkenstock, said. “Grocery stores are also doing good, but the difference is when this is over, the grocery stores go back to just being grocery stores. But if you didn’t have the Amazon app before, you do now.”

Hi everyone!

DataHawk Blockbuster Analysis is a blog series that analyzes the top products in a given category on the Amazon US marketplace and delivers priceless insights on product trends, ratings, reviews, sponsored and more…

We analyzed the products that entered the top 100 selling spots on Amazon.com on the Grocery & Gourmet Food department over a 365-days time period from April 2019 – April 2020.

At DataHawk we have analyzed over 693 unique products from 266 brands. The top-performing brand being Nespresso and the top-performing product being “Nespresso Capsules VertuoLine,  30 Count Coffee Pods”. The average price for the category ” Grocery & Gourmet ” is $16.55. With an average product rating count of 4,600, the average product ratings for the category were found to be ☆4.58.

Let us now analyze the category on different parameters.

“Nespresso”, “Clif”, and “KIND” made it to the list as the top three brands in the category with 8, 7 and 10 products with the highest presence rate in the batch. Nespresso is topping the list with 8 products by presence rate of 100%, a total of 1317 days of presence, significant. Its top-performing product is: Nespresso Capsules VertuoLine.

Clif is 2nd top-performing brand with 7 blockbuster products, for 861 days of the year, “Clif Kid ZBAR” being its top-performing product.

Third on the list is “KIND”, 10 Blockbusters products and a total presence of 816 days with all products in Top 10, “Dark Chocolate Bar Nuts & Sea Salt” being the most popular product out of the lot.

Looking at the brands that had the longest presence in the top 10 BSR with at least one product from April 2019 – April 2020, other than the top 3 we have, Planters, Solimo, Peet’s Coffee, Nestlé Pure Life, Lakanto, Pepperidge Farm, Welch’s Fruit Snacks & Quaker.

It is very interesting to note that all these products in the top ten category have been present throughout the year. It is rather striking that the brands “Solimo”, “Peet’s Coffee”, “Nestlé Pure Life” & “Welch’s Fruit Snacks” with 2 or 3 products max. are grouped in this category with brands like Planters with 17 products.

The Brands Leaderboard gives us a clear idea of the most popular grocery subcategories, these are,  No1. coffee followed by No. 2 snack foods & No. 3 breakfast foods. Starting with these non-perishables, consumers are definitely getting the feel for online ordering and delivery and gaining the confidence to include dairy, meat, frozen foods and fruits, and vegetables in their next orders

Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods, a brand renowned for quality in meat, fruit and vegetables and other perishables, has been counting to propel Amazon’s grocery strategies further with an assist from Whole Food’s 365 Everyday Value private-label packaged goods brand, as well as Amazon’s own Happy Belly coffee and spices, Mama Bear baby foods, and Wickedly Prime snack foods. It was found that, Solimo & Choc zero are the two Amazon brands that made it to the top 25.

A deeper look into the top brands that spent the most time in the top 25 Grocery & Gourmet Food.

It is found that 21 brands have had a presence rate of 100%. 

The commodity that is solely dominating the category is Coffee. We can see that more than 10 brands ranking in the top 25 leaderboard are coffee brands, for instance, Nespresso, Planters, Peet’s Coffee, Nestle Pure Life, Lavaza, McCafe, etc.

Nespresso is also present in the leaderboard with a partnership with Starbucks as “Starbucks by Nespresso”, which did not rank in the top 25, but still, it is impressive. Out of this list of 25, around 12 brands are related to snacks, cereal bars, and other munchies. A striking 99.2% presence(highest product presence rate) is made by “The Original Donut Shop K-Cup Pods“ in the top 25 list.

Here is the key data on products that spent the most time in the Top 100.

We have analyzed here the average, median, top and low quartile, and min and max of the price, star ratings and ratings of the top 100 products that entered the BSR Top 100 in the category Grocery & Gourmet Foods on Amazon US.

Out of the top 100 products in the category, 75% of the products are on average priced at $23.99 with average star ratings of 4.70. The maximum price quoted in this category in the top 100 is $49.31 and the maximum star ratings are 4.80. It can be inferred that the competition in this category is super high especially on the basis of price. A product with good ratings and in the top quartile price range could make it to the top 100 for sure.

This section is all about top 3 products dominating the Best Seller Ranking:

The big winner of the year is the $33 “Capsules VertuoLine”, by Nespresso. This has a rating of 4.9 out of 5. (Voted to be the best in the category). Next on the list is  “Super Crema Whole Bean Coffee Blend,” by Lavazza, which has had a presence of 99.2% which is 362 days in a year. The $30.23 “KCup Pods”, by The Original Donut Shop is ranked 3rd on the list with the presence rate of 99.2% of the year.

It is very interesting that the top 2 products on the list are both “coffee”.

Coffee is, in fact, one of the most widely consumed beverages worldwide and in the United States. Millions of consumers all across the country cannot imagine starting their day without a hot cup of coffee. According to the data from Statista Brazil, which is the biggest coffee producing country, has been producing approximately 61.7 million 60 kilogram bags of coffee a year since 2018.

It is also found that out of the total sales of coffee approximately 14% is sold on eCommerce platforms, the majority of which is sold on Amazon.

A deeper look into the top product that spent the most time in the top 100 Grocery & Gourmet Food.

We have monitored the search volume, the competition score, median price, ratings and star rating for products ranking organically on page 1 for a set of selected Keyword examples.

The Competition Score reflects what extent the Keyword is deemed to be competitive on Amazon and it’s based on a set of parameters such as the Reviews and Ratings of the competing products that are ranking for that keyword. For instance, for brand “Nespresso” the main keyword used by them is “Coffee Maker” which has a search volume of 165,000/mo, with max. star rating5.0★ & number of ratings 19,452.

n this part of our research article, we have presented the performance of brands in terms of their ASP with respect to the Presence Rate.

Very interesting to see that all the brands listed on the top 10 list are competing on the basis of their ASP.

The brand with the highest ASP is Solimo which is an Amazon brand and is priced at $32. It is followed by Nespresso at $31. These two brands seem to compete very closely with each other in terms of share of voice, but it is significant that Solimo is on the top in this analysis having 2 products in top 10 BSR competing against Nespresso with 8 products in the same list.

The average ASP of this category is $16.55. With the comparisons made on the basis of the Presence Rate, it is evident that coffee has extremely high competition on Amazon and for that matter other platforms too.

With this analysis, we are able to determine, which brands are in the closest competition to each other, for example, Planters, Lakanto, Welch’s Fruit Snacks & Pepperidge Farm, Solimo, Peet’s Coffee & Nespresso, Clifbar & KIND.

Your NPS score is an indication of your customers’ engagement with your brand. The most important is to have a higher score than that of your nearest competitor.

Net Promoter Score: we analyze the NPS based on the average of all products of a brand that enters the top 100 of a specific category during a period of time. 

Blockbusters Catalog Size: Amount of all products combined with a brand that entered the top 10 in a specific category in a given period.

It is found that the brand “KIND” has the highest NPS score that is 98% with a catalog size of  10 products, this clearly indicates the high number of reviews and ratings that the brand has on all these 10 products on Amazon. With a median rating of 4.5 out of 5, and the maximum number of ratings are 6423.

“Welch’s Fruits and snacks” has the lowest NPS and one of the smallest catalog size too. It is still interesting to compare the presence rate with this situation where “Welch’s Fruits and snacks” have maintained their presence throughout the year having low ratings as compared to others.

The performance of the brand “Planters” in this category is rather significant, it has the second-lowest NPS score on the list is 82 for the brand Planters. It is definitely the top product in this category as it has maintained the reviews and ratings quality and quantity with 17 products on the list. It is a brand with the highest number of products on the list.