Lotte Mart Presents Various Ultra-Fresh Products... "Offline Is Still Best for Fresh Food"

Selecting dawn strawberries at Lotte Mart store.

[Asia Economy Reporter Lim Chunhan] Large supermarkets are putting all their efforts into strengthening their fresh food competitiveness to gain an advantage over online malls.

On the 18th, Lotte Mart launched the theme of "Ultra-Fresh Fresh Food" since 2020 to maximize its fresh food competitiveness. This is because they judged that fresh food is the only breakthrough for offline stores to gain an edge in competition with e-commerce.

Since February, Lotte Mart has been selling dawn strawberries harvested early in the morning and available in stores by the afternoon. Sales of this product have increased more than threefold compared to the previous year. Additionally, starting in March, about 30% of all vegetables, mainly leafy greens, have been harvested and stocked in stores on the same day, with some stores already operating this system and plans to expand it to all stores later.

The ultra-fresh eggs introduced in July last year are collected from designated farms in the morning, sorted, washed, and packaged, then sold in stores by the afternoon of the same day or the next morning. Products not sold on the day of arrival are all discarded as a principle. However, all products stocked on the same day have been sold out on the same day, maintaining a 0% discard rate so far. Sales have steadily increased, more than doubling compared to July 2020.

A Lotte Mart official said, "The fact that customers can purchase products harvested on the same day at the store is a unique strength of offline stores, and we expect to enhance the competitiveness of large supermarkets by utilizing this." He added, "We plan to continuously increase related items so that customers can feel the freshness of farms in the stores."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.