Desk report preview
Grocery Desk · Q3 2026
Eight European grocery markets grew. Three shrank.
Food volume runs from -1.0% to +5.1% across the eleven markets — a spread of 6.1 points on one measure. Eurostat volume of sales, deflated, so this is food actually moved rather than money taken.
Separately, 17 brand movements are published across seven markets. The two are different measurements and Cadence joins neither to the other.
Eleven markets. 105 grocery and retail brands observed. One comparable view of where the category is growing, where it is not, and where attention is changing hands.
Explore the Grocery Desk →What was bought
Food volume, eleven markets, one footing
Eurostat's volume of retail sales for food, beverages and tobacco, year on year. Volume rather than value, so price effects are out of the measurement — a rise is more food sold, not the same food at a higher price.
A market-level series with no brand in it. It says nothing about any individual grocer's sales, share or performance, and the figures are not a ranking of the markets against each other — each is measured against its own year earlier.
What was searched for
Attention changing hands, inside a basket
Share of search attention between the named grocers in each market's own basket, against the same period a year earlier, replicated across two independent query configurations. Seven of eleven markets publish one.
Netherlands · the widest redistribution in the set
These sum to 0.00 points, and that is the point. Share within a basket is zero-sum by construction, so Plus rising is Jumbo, Albert Heijn, Dirk falling. It is not evidence that Plus grew. A brief that explains only the riser explains the smaller half of what happened.
Share of search attention is not market share, sales, revenue, footfall or customers, and no forecast is made from it. A market absent from this table published no qualifying movement; that is a result, not a gap in the data.
In the complete desk report
What the Grocery Desk answers
Every market read on one footing, with the evidence under each figure. It answers:
- 01 Is the shift I am seeing my market, my region, or my brand? Food volume for all eleven markets against each market's own year earlier, with the all-retail series beside it so a category move can be separated from a whole-basket one.
- 02 Where is attention changing hands between grocers, and toward whom? 17 published movements across seven markets, each with its basket, both delta estimates and the share it now holds — risers shown with their fallers.
- 03 Which grocers does Cadence observe in which markets? 105 brands across the eleven editions, with the advertising activity observed for each. Presence is observed; spend is not, and is never inferred from it.
- 04 Where would a single European grocery plan stop making sense? The 6.1-point spread on food volume alone, plus the markets where the basket moved and the markets where it did not, with what each state licenses a reader to say.
- 05 What should this desk be watching next quarter? The open questions the current evidence raises, stated as questions rather than predictions, with what would have to change before any could be answered more strongly.
The questions are listed here. The answers are in the report.
One sector, eleven markets
The Grocery Desk · Q3 2026
What was bought and what was searched for, across every market Cadence reads, on one footing and with the evidence under each figure. One quarter, yours to keep.
€2,400 + VAT · Grocery Desk
A single market's full read, including its other sectors, is the country report. Every market and the European comparison together is Cadence Europe.