Sector dossier · Food
Food retail in Asia
Food is the trip generator. Whoever owns fresh in a given city owns frequency, and frequency is what makes every other category in the store work. Across Asia that ownership is being contested on three fronts at once: wet markets that still hold the fresh mandate in much of Southeast Asia, modern grocers pushing smaller formats closer to the home, and quick-commerce operators buying their way into the top-up trip. This dossier sets out how we read the category, which structural shifts we treat as durable and which we treat as funded, and what we ask food retailers when we sit down with them.
What we are watching
Format compression
The hypermarket is being unbundled. Bulk moves online or to warehouse clubs, the daily trip moves to convenience-sized formats, and the middle is where the closures happen.
Fresh as the moat
Every grocer in the region says fresh is a differentiator. Very few can show the supply chain — cold rooms, direct sourcing, shrink discipline — that would make it one.
Own label maturing
Private label is moving past the price-fighter tier into mid and premium ranges, which changes the negotiation with brands rather than simply pressuring it.
How the category is structured
- Traditional trade — wet markets, provision stores, street vendors — still carries a large share of the fresh basket in Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and much of India.
- Modern grocery is concentrated by city rather than by country; national share numbers hide near-duopolies in individual metros.
- Convenience chains in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Thailand act as food-service operators as much as retailers, with ready meals doing the heavy lifting.
- Quick commerce sits on top of all of it, mostly as an add-on trip rather than a replacement for the weekly shop.