Romanian consumers spend about 650 million lei (€137 mln) on organic food (or 1.2% of the entire spending on food in the country), ZF has calculated from the data supplied by market research company Retail Zoom.
Interest in health and the improvement in purchasing power led to a significant growth of the market before the pandemic.
During the pandemic, the appetite for organic food somewhat dropped, so the growth rate of the sales of such products went from almost 22% in March 2020 to 14.4% during May-October, compared with the year-ago period.
The growth rate of the sales of non-organic food was even higher, 15.2% compared with the corresponding period of 2019.
“The trend is because of a number of factors. On the one hand, it’s obvious the pandemic caused huge disturbances on the food market, so the shopping basket changed. On the other hand, Romanian consumers have become more price conscious,” says Bogdana Gheorghe, managing director of Retail Zoom.
The price gap between organic and non-organic food in supermarkets varies greatly, with the former being 20% to 30% more expensive than the latter or their price being double the price of the latter.