Consumers Forsake Wet Markets in Asia

A recently released study from ACNielsen, involving 15,000 consumers across the Asia Pacific, shows that supermarkets are slowly eroding the share of the traditional wet market when consumers are out shopping for groceries.

According to Ashok Charan, Executive Director at ACNielsen Research Singapore, 'Wet markets still have a significant role, but they are now not as important as they used to be. Consumers used to get 90% of their fresh foods, such as seafood and fish, from wet markets. But now that figure is down to 71%'. The study shows that in Singapore, 80% of shoppers now spend the majority of their monthly household expenditure at supermarkets, followed by 69% of households in Hong Kong, 53% in the Philippines, 49% in South Korea and China and 48% in Japan.

Mr Charan believes that supermarkets have managed to erode the dominance of the wet market by trying to replicate the experience of traditional grocery shopping. 'Supermarkets are focusing on fresh foods in a much stronger manner, sometimes through positioning. For example, (Singaporean supermarket chain) Cold Storage calls itself the 'fresh food people'. Equally, in hypermarkets, the range of fresh produce is quite large. And their layouts try to replicate the wet market in terms of the shopping experience'.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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