wants to be the center of your daily diet

Mercadona It no longer wants to be the place where you make your purchases. Or not alone at least. What he aspires to now is to become the default place where you eat, where they prepare your food, heat it, devour it and even have your mid-morning or after-dinner coffee. The first step to achieve this was taken already some years with the launch of its section ‘Ready to Eat’ and since then he has not stopped doubling the bet, spreading it to its wide local network.

Now he has gone one step further.

In addition to cooking you an omelette, a Teriyaki chicken, a sandwich, some stuffed eggplants, a poke salmon or even a Valencian paellaMercadona wants to serve you freshly ground coffee. AND seen the data of the sector makes a lot of sense.

To Mercadona to drink coffee

That there are people (many) who go to Mercadona in search of coffee is nothing new. In fact some of their articles have become so popular that they have their own followers. What is new is that people do not go to Juan Roig stores looking for packages, bags of grain or capsules for their machines, but to prepare freshly ground coffee and serve it in a glass ready to drink, which is what the company has started to do in Valencia.

So confirmed it the company to The Economist in March, when he revealed that he was taking a test in dozens of stores spread throughout the Valencian geography. “In some stores in the province we have incorporated the option that the boss, which is what we call our customers, can take freshly ground coffee. It is a laboratory,” they explained. The idea started in 58 points and four products: black coffee, coffee, with milk and cappuccino.

Everything (or almost everything) related to Mercadona generates excitement inside and outside the networks and its coffee service has been no exception. In x, instagram either TikTok It didn’t take long for videos to appear of people showing the new machines in Roig’s stores and even testing the result, as Cafemaxpag did in one piece (with a bittersweet balance) that soon gained thousands of views. You can even see photos that show the same service in Portugal.

Expectation is no guarantee of success, but the chain made it clear that I would be attentive to the answer in its stores in the province of Valencia. “We plan to expand this laboratory after the summer and the coffee can be purchased in stores in the Community of Madrid,” advanced in March. Today the service is announced already on their website, where a map confirms that it offers freshly ground coffee in several locations throughout Madrid and the Valencian Community. In Cuenca it has an establishment that also incorporates a machine for consumption.

At this point, the question is… Why is Mercadona launched, which in 2024 achieved a net profit of 1,384 millionto the adventure of freshly ground coffee?

Three words: ‘Ready to Eat’

Coffee is not an experiment disconnected from Mercadona’s global strategy. On the contrary. The company itself recognize that connects with a much broader initiative, worked on and whose origins can be traced back to at least 2018: ‘Ready to Eat’a branch of the company that aspires to turn Roig’s stores into the food reference for Spanish families.

The central idea is what we mentioned at the beginning of this report: that people not only go to the supermarket to buy food to fill the refrigerator at home, but that they leave there with food already prepared. Or even eaten.

In summary, the service consists of a section within Mercadona stores in which a series of products are sold. ready-made dishes. And that includes everything from different starters and appetizers to pizzas, burgers, sandwiches and main dishes such as lentils, meatballs, pasta, paella, chicken, sushi assortments or Teriyaki chicken. In 2024 the list was expanded with salmon with vegetables, ribs and seafood salad. Now Mercadona completes it with a freshly ground coffee service.

In some stores the idea is not only that the customer finds their food already ready, but that they can taste it right there. Without leaving the premises. “You can heat any dish in one of our microwaves, grab cutlery and, in some of our stores, you can consume right there,” explains the company.

The model is not exclusive from Mercadona. Other chains, such as Alcampo, The English Court either Carrefour (to name just a handful of examples) they have also opted for prepared dishes. Sometimes with spaces to taste them.

Because at Mercadona they are convinced that, to a large extent, the future of supermarket chains is not so much about marketing food for customers to prepare at home, but rather offering them already prepared and ready dishes.

Instead of chicken, potatoes, oil and salt, you are offered the tray with the roasted thighs directly. Instead of coffee packets, they switch to freshly ground coffee. I explained it clearly Roig himself during the last presentation of results. “I said it and I maintain it: in the middle of the century there will be no kitchens.”

All to save you time

Beyond the rhetoric Mercadona seems to be betting on that conviction in its stores. In his last annual report The company explains that last year the service was incorporated into one hundred and a half new stores, which brings the total network to 1,260 supermarkets, 1,200 in Spain and the existing 60 in Portugal. Taking into account that the chain has a little more 1,600 establishments In Spain, the level of implementation is more than considerable and already exceeds 70%.

The company does not publish detailed financial data for its different business areas, but ensures that the ‘Ready to eat’ section, “has not stopped growing”. In 2024 the entire company invoiced 38,835 millionwhich allowed him increase by 37% its net profit to reach 1,384 million.

Mercadona’s bet (like that of chains such as Alcampo or El Corte Inglés) is not based only on intuition or hunches. The sector already handles data that reveals the potential of the prepared meals market, that already moves billionaire figures. The Spanish association of manufacturers (Asefapre) estimates that in 2024 its consumption in homes grew by 6.6%consolidating the ascending trend of the last years and exceeding 702,200,000 kg.

According to the employers’ calculations, this volume of product translated into sales worth 4,197 million euros, 5.9% more than the previous year.

The association speaks in general of “prepared dishes”, not only prepared ones ready for consumption, but the data is revealing.

Among its range of products consumption grows of refrigerated ready meals (+7.8%), which represent almost half of the sector, frozen options (+5.5%) and those prepared at room temperature, whose demand increased by 6.8% and now represents 13% of the market. Last year and always according to Asefapre data, per capita consumption of prepared dishes stood at almost 17.2 kg.

Asefrapre is not the only one that has analyzed the phenomenon. The consulting firm Kantar has also put the thermometer to the market for prepared and “ready to eat” dishes and their consumption in Spanish supermarkets and detected a 48% growth in a couple of years. The firm’s data shows another equally interesting fact: approximately 20% of the time they are consumed outside the home.

In 2019 Kantar noted a 10% growth in the ready-to-eat food category in the main supermarket chains, with Mercadona leading the growth, although it also cited companies such as Auchan, Carrefour, Dia or Bon Pre. Other ststemiq study esteem in 63% increase in consumption of pre-cooked dishes in Spain between 2008 and 2022.

“The interest at this moment lies in the search for balance between time, health and culinary pleasure“, recently recognized to the newspaper 20Minutes Veronika Khurshudyan, director of Kantar. In his opinion, consumers “are no longer just buying food,” they are now “looking for solutions.” The phenomenon coincides with another, key for the sector: the loss of incentives among Generation Z to cook.

The myths? Added to this are lack of time, professional ambitions, social life and even cost analysis. “If someone values ​​their time at 15 euros an hour and has to shop, cook and clean afterwards, buying convenience at a relatively low cost may seem like a rational option,” explains to Euractiv Christine Yung Hung, agri-food marketing researcher in Ghent.

Anton Delbarre, from EuroCommerce, recognized that these types of products “are outpacing overall grocery growth,” helping chains offset the sales decline in other departments, such as fish.

The expansion of prepared dishes brings opportunities, but also challenges, as the OCU recalls in an article in which he warns that we Spaniards eat worse than just ten years ago. “The consumption of prepared dishes ultra-processed rich in salt, sugar, saturated fats and additives is becoming more common every day and is 90% higher than the advisable frequency”.

Citing sources such as the Ministry of Agriculture’s Consumer Panel, the OCU remembers that these changes in diet have been accompanied by a 6% increase in people with excess weight since 2014. “These figures have not influenced the increase in the prevalence of diseases related to poor eating habits, such as high blood pressure, which has also increased from 15.7 to 18.7% in just ten years,” the organization states.

Images | TikTok and Mercadona

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