2024 Center Store Productivity Trends in the U.S. Grocery Channel

While the center store grocery space has grown slowly in the past two years, sales have lagged. A typical grocery shelf is now 7% less productive than it was in 2022. This makes accurate, performance-aligned measurements more important than ever to protect and improve shelf space allocation for retailers and manufacturers.

Highlights

• Certain aisles, such as liquor, frozen meat, poultry, seafood, and nutrition, have grown in space without corresponding performance improvements.
• The shift to e-commerce should drive space changes. Fresh categories showed stronger performance trends compared to center store products.
• Food and beverage categories, despite driving 84% of the space growth, are still under-spaced in the center store.
• Fresh categories show stronger performance trends vs. center store products, which is another pressure point for justifying center store space.