Hungary’s grocery market is growing in forint terms, but the figures suggest something more complex than a simple consumer recovery. Food retail is expanding, while the physical weekly shop, online ordering and rapid-delivery services are increasingly being used for different purposes.
The latest annual data from Hungary’s Central Statistical Office (KSH) underlines the distinction. Specialized and non-specialized food shops recorded HUF 9.994 trillion in sales in 2025, up from HUF 9.440 tln a year earlier. That is a substantial increase in current prices, but it should not be confused with an equivalent rise in the quantity of goods bought. The volume of sales at food shops rose by 2.2%.
The market is growing in real terms, but price is still decisive. Grocery spending reflects not only what households buy, but how they divide purchases between store formats, delivery speeds and product ranges.
The nominal rise in food-shop turnover was close to 6%, while volume growth was far more modest. That gap matters. It means the market is advancing, but it does not support the idea that consumers have returned to a more relaxed spending pattern after the inflation shock.
KSH data cannot reveal whether shoppers reached that result by changing brands, waiting for promotions or visiting more than one retailer. Those choices require consumer-panel evidence rather than national retail tables. The official figures show that food sales are advancing in quantity again, but at a pace that leaves price, range and convenience central to competition.
The same caution is needed when discussing e-commerce. Mail-order and internet retail sales reached HUF 1.777 tln in 2025, compared with HUF 1.607 tln in 2024. In volume terms, that category grew by 8.5%, well above the 2.2% increase recorded by food shops.
That does not mean Hungary’s online grocery market is worth HUF 1.777 tln. KSH’s category covers internet and mail-order retail across product groups, not e-grocery alone. Still, its growth shows that online purchasing is taking a larger role in everyday retail. For FMCG, the question is not whether every household will abandon the supermarket, but how digital channels are changing the occasions on which people buy food, drinks and household staples.
Auchan’s expanded partnership with Foodora is a practical example. In March of this year, all 19 Auchan hypermarkets and five supermarkets in Hungary became available through the delivery platform, which advertised delivery within 60 minutes. The retailer retained its own e-commerce service with a range of more than 20,000 products, while the rapid-delivery channel was positioned as an additional option.
Géza Vincze, CEO of Auchan Hungary, said in a joint Auchan-Foodora press release announcing the link up on March 11 that the partnership was intended to complement the retailer’s existing services.
“We are complementing our existing services with our new partner, Foodora,” he said. “By covering different delivery zones around every store, we can bring our products to more customers quickly and conveniently.”
The distinction is commercially important. A retailer that tries to make every order look like a full weekly shop may make delivery unnecessarily expensive. A retailer that treats every purchase as urgent rapid delivery risks narrowing its customer base and undermining the logic of a value-led food offer. The more realistic model is one in which several channels coexist, each serving a different mission.
Péter Garai, managing director of Foodora Hungary, described the demand side of that model in the same joint Auchan-Foodora press release.
“Demand for fast and convenient services is continuously growing: our growth in the grocery and retail segment far exceeds that of traditional food delivery,” he said.
That illustrates why grocery and retail have become a strategic priority for delivery platforms. Wolt, for example, said in a press release issued on April 30 that its retail vertical accounted for more than a quarter of the company’s global gross merchandise value in 2025. That is self-reported global data, not evidence of Hungarian grocery demand, but it does help explain the industry’s direction.
Panos Karouzos, vice president of new verticals at Wolt, described the shift: “We are seeing a structural transformation from food delivery towards everyday local commerce.”
For food retailers, the task is not to choose between stores and apps. It is to keep the value proposition intact while adding new ways to shop. A customer should be able to use a physical store for a full basket, a conventional web shop for a scheduled delivery and a rapid-delivery partner for an immediate need, without being pushed into a more expensive version of the same purchase.
The delivery channel will not make the physical food store obsolete. Specialized and non-specialized food shops still generated almost HUF 10 tln in sales last year, and their volumes grew. The store remains the foundation of food retail, particularly for larger baskets, fresh products and price-sensitive comparisons.
The emerging market is not defined by a clean shift from offline to online, but by a more fragmented purchase journey. A household can make a trip to a supermarket for a big shop, place a scheduled online order and use a delivery platform for smaller needs in the same week. That creates more choice for shoppers, but it also raises the bar for retailers on price transparency, assortment discipline and efficient fulfillment.
For this year’s figures, the central FMCG question is not simply whether turnover will rise. It is whether retailers can serve these different shopping missions without diluting the value that attracted customers in the first place
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of July 31, 2026.
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