Unlocking the online retail opportunity with European farmers
What can digital retailers in the agriculture sector do to encourage what could be a €10 billion market?
European farmers are early adopters in many areas—for example, yield improvement, sustainability, and animal welfare. In one area, though, they appear to be late adopters: they rarely go online to buy core inputs, machinery, and agritech.
That was the finding of a 2019 McKinsey survey of more than 1,000 farmers in seven countries—Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain.1 According to that research, only 13 percent of European farmers had made an online purchase of seeds, fertilizer, crop protection, animal feed or animal-feed additives, farm equipment, or software or other agritech in the previous 12 months.2 Moreover, their general view of online retail was one of skepticism.
However, these attitudes and practices might be changing because of the coronavirus pandemic; a follow-up survey in May 2020 found that a much higher percentage of respondents are now saying they prefer to purchase agricultural products online. The implication is that there is an opportunity for companies in the agriculture industry to accelerate their online presence, work out omnichannel strategies, and maybe even change their business models entirely to meet farmers’ needs better. In this article, we set out the barriers to online retail in the European agricultural sector and then discuss how to address them.
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Πηγή: mckinsey
