Augusto Beato Urges Food Companies to Embrace E-commerce

Portland SEO's Augusto Beato anticipates more food companies to embrace e-commerce as online food and beverage sales experience a spike in sales.

"While e-commerce makes up less than 5 percent of total food and beverage sales, the sector is growing rapidly," Beato pointed out. "Meanwhile, in-store sales, meanwhile, are stagnant or declining in some cases."

Online grocery sales are forecasted to reach $100 billion by as early as 2022, and that 70 percent of shoppers will at least occasionally shop for groceries online by that time, according to the Food Marketing Institute and Nielsen.

Beato, who is the CEO of Portland SEO, noted that the food and beverage sector lagged retailers in utilizing e-commerce when there is a lot at stake in online trade, and the earlier for them to start enhancing their online sales platforms, the better.

He added that large snacks producers such as Mondelēz International and Hershey have set their ambitions to generate billions of dollars alone from e-commerce.

Food companies hoping to engage the services of Portland SEO and boost online sales may contact the company through this link.

Mondelēz, the packaged foods company that owns brands including Oreo, Ritz, Chips Ahoy!, Belvita, Cadbury, Trident and more, targets over $1 billion e-commerce revenues by 2020, has named marketing agency Scrum50 as its e-commerce agency of record.

This move points to how important e-commerce is becoming for Mondelez as well as for the consumer packaged goods sector more broadly. Mondelez said the agency was selected for its expertise in Amazon marketplace as evidenced in past efforts.

Mondelēz also partnered with several regional online stores – Snapdeal in India and Alibaba in China.

Meanwhile, Hershey has also adopted various e-commerce strategies to better engage with online consumers over the years, including the ‘click and collect’ model. It is ramping up e-commerce across its brands as consumers, especially millennials do more of their grocery shopping online.

Hershey also restructured its departments earlier this year so that digital-focused employees could be integrated directly into the company’s sales and marketing sectors.