Arla Foods to supercharge sales in E-commerce

Arla is fast tracking its plans to become European dairy market leader for e-commerce and aims to double its sales via its customers’ online platforms to EUR 600 mio across Europe. Having witnessed a rapid growth in its e-commerce sales during the pandemic, with growth doubling in many key markets during 2020, Arla is now harnessing this development, as locked-down consumers continue to seek out household brands such as Arla® and Lurpak® during their online shopping.

The farmer-owned cooperative is supercharging its existing e-commerce plans 3-5 years ahead of schedule, increasing investments in its online presence, extending the number of expert e-commerce employees across the sales and marketing organization in the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Finland and aims to double the retail sales ambition from EUR 300 mio to EUR 600 mio by 2025 across Europe.

“We have a clear goal of becoming dairy market leader for e-commerce in Europe and continuing to be a preferred partner for our customers. E-commerce was on the rise in Europe before the COVID-19 crisis and we had been preparing on the technological side and with our customers for some time. The pandemic has rapidly changed behaviors towards online channels and this shift represents an opportunity for us to push our e-commerce ambitions forward in the innovation pipeline and the work is well under way,” says Executive Vice President and CCO for Arla Europe, Peter Giørtz Carlsen.

Arla’s ability to fast track its e-commerce plans is partly due to the success of the transformation and cost-savings programme Calcium, as this has ensured that the cooperative is able to shift gears in a very agile way and reinvest in the business to boost online sales across Europe. The expanded new e-commerce acceleration team will focus on data analysis, driving online campaigns and visual content to make it easy for the online shopper to find Arla’s household products.

Online grocery shopping is here to stay

As the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic is again limiting movement across the globe, grocery shopping online, including fresh food items such as dairy, is becoming a longer-term change in consumer behaviors. With the increased investment in e-commerce, Arla continues to be a key partner and support its customers with expanding their online shops and ensuring that consumers continue to have the same quick and easy access to dairy products that they know from physical stores.

“We know that consumers still want to be able to choose healthy and sustainable food like dairy when they shop online. Therefore, we want to maximize our online availability and visibility with our customers. With our new ambitious strategy and increased investments, we are accelerating our online presence and delivering well known household dairy products to European consumers on a broad range of platforms,” says Executive Vice President and CCO for Arla Europe, Peter Giørtz Carlsen.

With the new e-commerce strategy Arla has set an ambitious goal to have 10% of all retail sales across core European markets come from e-commerce.

Arla engages with millions of consumers every day

Every year Arla engages with consumers 600 million times on its own digital platforms such as websites and social media. That is more than 1.6 million times every single day of the year. With the new investments and strategy for e-commerce Arla wants to create even easier access to Arla’s products by collaborating closer with European e-retailers to ensure that fresh dairy products such as milk, yoghurt, butter and cheese are visible on the online grocery shop shelves. An example of this is the Click&Cook® service in Denmark and Sweden. When consumers look up a recipe, they can click on a Click&Cook® button and it automatically fills the online grocery basket with the needed ingredients.

At the moment, one of Arla’s biggest markets for e-commerce is the UK, where 17 per cent of total retail sales come through e-commerce channels. In Arla’s other European markets, it makes up a smaller, but growing, contribution to overall sales with e-commerce accounting for around five-seven per cent of sales in key markets of Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands.

Facts about Arla’s e-commerce:

• Arla’s goal is to become dairy market leader for e-commerce. Arla’s ambition is to double its online retail sales from EUR 300 mio to EUR 600 mio by 2025 and to have 10% of all sales across Europe to come from online retail sales.
• Arla plans to increase investments in its e-commerce business extending the number of expert e-commerce employees across the sales and marketing organization in the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Finland.
• Every year Arla engages with consumers 600 million times through its digital platforms such as arla.com and arla.dk, .se and .uk and on its social media channels on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
• UK is European market leader for Arla on e-commerce with 17% of Arla’s retail sales in the UK coming from online. During the first wave of the pandemic in the UK market, dairy was in virtually every e-commerce basket (97%) and Arla’s e-commerce hit a record peak of +119% in the UK during the first wave of the pandemic.
• In Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, online retail sales of Arla brands doubled reaching between 5-7 per cent in 2020.