- Circana
- Mar 11, 2025
- 1 min read
Updated: Nov 25, 2025
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.
