Men grocery shop more often. Photo Eleventh Earl

Over the past 20 years, men have been taking on an increasingly larger role in their households’ grocery shopping. A 2008 study by Nielsen found that men now account for more than 38% of dollars spent at supermarkets. This is up from 30% two years earlier, a 13% year-on-year increase. A recent Yahoo research study of 2,400 American men found that more than half claim to be the primary grocery shopper for their household. While this is a self-reported number and other studies have shown the actual number to be closer to 35%, there’s no doubt that men are an increasingly important target for marketing professionals at supermarket chains and CPGs.

Applying Location Analytics

We decided to take a more detailed look at this trend using Locately’s platform.
We collected semi-continuous location data from a diverse, age-balanced panel of opted-in consumers who shared their GPS data with Locately over a multi-month period. We analyzed more than 150,000 consumer-hours of GPS data in three different U.S. geographies, and we detected tens of thousands of trips – many of which were to grocery stores.

Men Make Take Shorter Trips

The key finding was that men spent less time in grocery stores on each trip, but made a significantly greater number of trips than women. The average time spent in the store was 11 minutes per visit for men and 19 minutes per visit for women. This was true across geographies. In addition, this trend was consistent across age categories: in every age bracket from 20-29 to 60+, men made significantly shorter trips than women.

Although they spent less time per trip, men consistently went to grocery stores more often. They averaged 2.0 trips per week as compared with 1.5 for women. As with visit time, age and geography did not appear to play a role. We also found that men were most likely to go grocery shopping on their way home from work in the evenings. This supports the hypothesis that these shorter trips were often grab-and-go midweek fill-in missions – possibly to grab necessary ingredients for dinner at the request of a spouse or partner.

We also looked at the breakdown between trips to conventional supermarkets versus specialty supermarkets such as Whole Foods. We found that women were no more likely than men to choose specialty grocery stores.

If you’re interested in the full analysis from this study or if you want to learn more about Location Analytics for consumer insights, email us: info@locately.com