The grocery industry is facing dramatic changes in how people purchase food as younger shoppers enter their prime family-building years — and retailers could lose 15% of their loyal customers in the next five years if they don’t take action — according to a report released last week by management consulting firm AlixPartners.
Young parents are significantly more likely than other consumers to divide their grocery spending among multiple channels, use e-commerce and opt for prepared foods, the report shows. These shoppers are also more inclined to view everyday prices at their primary store as high relative to what other stores charge, and they are less likely to favor traditional grocers.
AlixPartners defines young parents as people under 45 years old who have children under the age of 18 living with them.
Almost half of shoppers in this group buy prepared foods every week, compared with about a fifth of other shoppers, the firm found. Meanwhile, more than 60% of young parents purchase groceries online at least once a week — more than twice the percentage of other shoppers.
Grocers that depend on people directing most of their spending to a single retailer could be particularly vulnerable as people in Generation Z displace older shoppers in the grocery industry’s shopper base, AlixPartners said.
Almost three-quarters of young parents used at least three channels to buy groceries in 2025, compared with just 61% of others, according to the report.
Seventy percent of young parents in the Northeast and in the West said they made online grocery purchases at least weekly.
The gap between younger and other shoppers in terms of their interest in buying from conventional grocers is especially sharp in the West. Just over two-thirds of young parents in that region shopped at traditional grocers last year — 19 percentage points less than other shoppers. In addition, just 31% of young parents in the West use traditional grocers as their primary channel, while more than half of other shoppers in that part of the U.S. do.
Young parents in the West also place an especially high priority on prepared foods, according to the report. Fifty-eight percent of young parents in the region bought prepared foods weekly in 2025, compared with less than a quarter of other shoppers.
AlixPartners pointed out that while traditional grocers are under pressure from big box and club retailers, they are in a better position to lean into prepared food trends.
“The massive scale of the industry giants makes both ideation and execution of these programs significantly more complex. Regionals can invest their own labor into production and employ commissaries as they scale, and they can refresh their menus regularly based on local trends, seasonality, customer mix and more,” the firm said in its report.
The firm also said that grocers are not using loyalty programs to their full potential, noting that the retailers often use the programs primarily as ways to collect data instead of building productive relationships with consumers. “[T]hese programs often incentivize purchases that the grocer and its vendors want rather than acknowledging and rewarding shoppers for returning to the grocer time and time again specifically for certain items and categories,” AlixPartners wrote.
AlixPartners’ findings are based on a survey of 1,635 consumers AlixPartners conducted in October 2025. Of those people, 440 fit the firm’s definition of young parents.
