A new report from global consulting firm AlixPartners: traditional grocers stand to lose 15% of their loyal customer base over the next five years as Gen Z ages into parenthood alongside younger Millennials. The finding comes from the firm’s 2026 Grocery Shopper Perspectives survey, fielded in October 2025 among 1,635 consumers, 440 of whom met the report’s definition of a young parent: someone under 45 raising a child younger than 18.
That threshold matters. AlixPartners is not describing a niche demographic quirk. It is describing the shopper who will train the next generation, Gen Alpha, on how a grocery trip is supposed to work.
Splitting one trip into three
Grocery shopping no longer means one store. Mintel’s 2026 research on Gen Z and Millennial e-commerce found that 74% of Gen Z shoppers say they are comfortable buying everything they need online, a habit built in categories far outside grocery that is now bleeding into how younger adults stock a kitchen.
A separate survey from supply chain firm o9 Solutions found that 62% of Gen Z shoppers planned to increase spending in summer 2026, more than any other generation, while treating no single retailer as their default. Only 12% said they intended to shop entirely online even as their overall channel count grew, a sign that fragmentation, not a wholesale move to e-commerce, is the defining shift.
AlixPartners’ young-parent research points to the same pattern inside grocery specifically. Nearly three-quarters of young parents shopped at least three different retail channels in 2025, compared with 61% of older shoppers, and the gap was sharpest in the Midwest, where young parents were 27 percentage points more likely than their neighbors to shop discount chains such as Aldi or Lidl.
The dinner hour moved online
The online grocery market has compounded for two years. Online orders accounted for more than 19% of total U.S. grocery sales in the first quarter of 2026, up from under 15 percent in the third quarter of 2024, according to retail analytics firm Brick Meets Click. The firm’s July data showed order frequency climbing nearly 15 percent year over year, driven largely by faster delivery windows from Amazon and Walmart rather than by new shoppers signing up.
That growth is not evenly distributed by age. AlixPartners found that 61% of young parents buy groceries online at least weekly, more than double the 27% rate among older consumers, with the gap widest in the Northeast and West, where 70% of young parents shop online weekly.
Prepared foods are riding the same current. 48% of young parents buy ready-to-eat meals every week versus 21% of other shoppers, and most describe the habit as a replacement for takeout rather than cooking, a distinction that puts grocers in competition with delivery apps as much as with each other.
Price skepticism runs deeper among the young
Trust in everyday pricing has eroded unevenly across generations. 38% of young parents told AlixPartners that everyday prices at their primary store run high compared with competitors, versus just 20% of older shoppers who said the same.
That skepticism is not happening in a vacuum. Bain & Company reported that year-over-year grocery purchase volume fell for five straight months between February and June 2026, the first sustained decline in more than a year.
Bain traced it to a sharp cut in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program spending in late 2025, rising gas prices, and grocery costs that have climbed roughly a third above pre-pandemic levels. 80% of shoppers told Bain they had cut back, and 49% said they were buying fewer items outright.
The two datasets point in the same direction from different angles. Young shoppers are not simply choosier by temperament. They are pricing every trip against tighter household math, and loyalty is the first casualty.
Loyalty cards are not solving the problem they were built for
AlixPartners partner Marco Di Marino singled out loyalty programs as an area where grocers are underperforming their own potential, arguing that a discount card too often functions as a hoop consumers must jump through rather than a genuine reward for repeat business.
The critique lands differently depending on which generation a retailer is trying to hold onto. A 2026 Supermarket Experience Study from The Shelby Report found that Net Promoter Score, a measure of how likely a shopper is to recommend their grocer, actually dips in middle age before rising again.
Gen Z shoppers posted a score of 52, matching Millennials, while Baby Boomers reached 65 and the Silent Generation hit 70. Gen X, ages 46 to 61, scored lowest at 46, below the study-wide benchmark of 55.
That finding complicates any assumption that youth alone explains disloyalty. Grocers losing Gen Z may be watching the leading edge of a pattern that will not simply reverse as today’s young parents age.
A ten-year window that is already closing
AlixPartners frames the next decade as a generational handoff on the scale of the Millennial wave that reshaped retail twenty years ago, only compressed by e-commerce adoption and AI tools that did not exist during that earlier transition.
Losing 15% of loyal shoppers within five years is not, in AlixPartners’ telling, a worst-case scenario. It is the baseline outcome if grocers keep optimizing for a full shop that fewer and fewer households are actually making.
