The assumption
Most European grocery planning carries one inherited idea: that pressure on households moves attention towards the discounter, everywhere, at different speeds. It is a reasonable prior. It is also testable, and this quarter seven markets published enough to test it.
What the measurements show
Cadence observes a four-brand grocery basket in each market and measures how share of search attention moved between those four over the year. Seven markets produced a brand that gained and a brand that lost at a precision we publish: Austria, Belgium, Spain, France, Ireland, the Netherlands and Sweden.
Sweden is the case the assumption predicts. In the others it is not what happened — and in two, the brand losing attention is the discounter.
One of seven. That is not a European pattern; it is a Swedish one.
France: no discounter in the frame at all
The French basket is Auchan, Carrefour, Intermarché and Leclerc — four full-range grocers, no hard discounter among them. Leclerc gained, ending the window on 40.6% of the basket’s attention. Carrefour lost, ending on 31.9%.
A trade-down story cannot be told from this. What moved in France is attention between two hypermarket groups, and the brands a trade-down narrative would reach for are not in the measured set.
The Netherlands: one gainer, three losers
The Dutch basket is Albert Heijn, Dirk, Jumbo and Plus. Plus gained and ended on 50.8% of basket attention. All three others lost: Jumbo to 26.2%, Albert Heijn to 15.7%, Dirk to 7.3%.
Dirk is the hard-discount name in that basket, and it is the smallest share and a faller. Whatever moved Dutch attention this year, it did not move it towards the cheapest shelf.
| Market | Gained | Lost |
|---|---|---|
| France | Leclerc, to 40.6% | Carrefour, to 31.9% |
| Netherlands | Plus, to 50.8% | Jumbo 26.2% · Albert Heijn 15.7% · Dirk 7.3% |
The share points above are within each market’s own basket and are not comparable between markets: a four-brand basket in France and a four-brand basket in the Netherlands are different denominators. Five further markets — Austria, Belgium, Spain, Ireland and Sweden — each published their own named riser and faller this quarter, and those figures are in the country editions.
Observed, interpreted, implied
Observed: in seven markets, a named brand gained share of grocery search attention over the year and a named brand lost it. Interpretation: sorting those brands into discount and full-range formats is our classification, not a Cadence measurement, and on that classification the discounter is the gainer in one market and the loser in two. Implication: a European grocery plan built on a single direction of travel will be wrong in most of the markets it covers.
The useful question is not how fast the discounter is gaining. It is whether it is gaining here at all.
What this does not establish
Search attention is not market share, sales, revenue, footfall or customers, and nothing here forecasts future share or says anything about advertising effectiveness. None of it is a sector classification. When this was written the Retail & Grocery sector read was withheld in all eleven markets, because the head-to-head comparison it rested on did not reproduce at the precision Cadence publishes. That read has since been rewired onto Eurostat retail trade volume and now classifies; the brand movements below are a separate measurement under a stricter bar and are unchanged by it
Measured on jointly scaled observations from a single Google Trends request, a 56-day window ending 30 September 2026 against the same 56 days a year earlier. A read, not a forecast.