JEDDAH — As 2021 kicks-off, Danube Online, the Kingdom’s leading online grocery shopping platform has shared insights into online grocery shopping trends from Danube App shoppers over the last 12 months.

With a 52% growth in new users of Danube Online in 2020 compared to the previous year, the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on the online platform’s customers’ shopping habits was evident. A healthy shopping trend peristed with a surge in demand for Organic products, up a whopping 78% in 2020, and Health and Diet products such as sugar-free, fish and meat protein, gluten free, and whole foods up 26% on the previous year.

Shopping categories such as Everyday Care with products like hand sanitizers and skin cleansing products and Daily Essentials shopping items such as milk, pasta, baking item products etc., saw a 68% and 23% increase in orders over the previous year respectively. Danube Online customers also took the opportunity to try new cooking recipes and cook at home.

The Danube Kitchen feature, which allows shoppers to browse recipes and add ingredients to their carts in ‘one click’, marked a 132% increase during the months of March-May compared to the rest of 2020. The most popular receipes were all wholesome recipes with nourishing fare such as the ‘Superfood immune boosting salad’, the ‘Super Green, immune boosting smoothie’ and the ‘Healthy Chocolate Cake’ dessert recipes.

“As we kick-off a new year, it’s insightful to see the grocery shopping trends that have emerged since the world and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia began tackling the Covid-19 health pandemic. As lockdowns ensued, we saw many people turn to online grocery shopping platforms for the first time and many customers start to cook more at home. Sale surges in panty items such as baking products were apparent and many shoppers begain using our Danube Kitchen, recipe browsing ‘click to add recipe to cart’ feature, with healthy food recipes being the most popular. Our goal is to deliver fresh groceries as soon as possible to our customers across the Kingdom, and we also feel priviledged to be able to provide the technology to make cooking healthy food at home easier for our valued customers,” said Majed M. AlTahan, MD & Co-founder, Danube Online.