Emerging Trends in Food Retailing:An Empirical Study on Customer Satisfaction

With increased number of food and grocery retail outlets and availability of a variety of products, customers have become accustomed to patronizing multiple retailers. Retailers have recognized this trend and are of the view that customer satisfaction plays a role in the success of business strategies. Therefore it has become important for food and grocery retailers to try to stay in business for a long time and need to establish a strong relationship with customer and their focus should be on the customer satisfaction. Advance information technology tools like Business Intelligence (BI) helps retailers to identify the likings and disliking of its customers and helps in building a strong bond with existing customers and also to attract many more new customers.

This paper investigates the customer preferences, and tries to find the impact of trends in retailing on customer satisfaction of food retailing in the Indian retail context. For this, an empirical study was conducted considering customers of five organized food retailers namely, More supermarket, Reliance Fresh, Spencer’s, Big Bazar and D Mart.  From the study, it is observed that majority of the customers of five food retail outlets reported positively towards product quality, reliability of services with present  trends in retailing; while Big Bazar and D mart are providing value for money, other retailers drive customer satisfaction with additional services.  In addition, comparative analysis between these organized food retail stores is shown.