Future trend "E-Food"- Participants at the 3rd foodRegio Marketing Menu Discuss New Opportunities for Online Retailing

Food is becoming an increasingly important issue for online retailers in Germany. Although consumers have regarded online shopping with considerable suspicion for a long time, the market is currently developing very quickly thanks to the fresh product supply chain logistics which has now come off age. The large number of start-ups in the food industry and the online shops of large food retailers, such as EDEKA and REWE, underline this trend.

It was against this background that the organisers from foodRegio and MARKENTECHNIK CONSULTING welcomed 18 participants from all over Germany to the stylish setting of the Charles & Ray Eames Room at Lübeck's Media Docks.

Owing to a last-minute change in the lineup (Stefan Sobczak, Managing Director of Netshops Commerce GmbH, unfortunately fell ill), the keynote speech was given as an interactive introduction by the moderator Henning Meyer, Managing Director of MARKENTECHNIK CONSULTING, who provided a rundown of the facts and figures for food e-commerce in recent years and emphasised the growing relevance of this topic in dialogue with the participants at the event.

The culinary hors d'oeuvre was followed up by Jörn Oeser, Head of Sales Management at EDEKA Nord, who offered some interesting insights into the online business of this retail giant and discussed in detail the shop structure on which his company's operations are based. Participating EDEKA supermarkets are able to pick and choose and offer customers their own individual product range on the young edekanord-shop.de website. The terms and conditions for a delivery or collection service in the supermarket itself can be defined by each shop.

The portal is currently in its beta version. However the number of supermarkets with their own online shops will grow rapidly according to Jörn Oeser, and will include further EDEKA supermarkets from Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Lower Saxony in addition to the shops which are already taking part in Hamburg and Heiligenhafen.

After the main course, Jörn Oeser presented the EDEKA online shop once more. This time "live", before patiently answering the many questions which participants had about online product ranges, prices, delivery times, delivery service and so on. The lively discussions then led onto the third and final line of thought for the evening, which was rounded off by a delicious desert.

The accompanying culinary program was again organised by the team from "das culinarium", which created a three course menu which perfectly reflected the autumn season. Judging from all the empty plates at the end of the events, the team's efforts were to the taste of the participants.