eCommerce Food Trends to Watch in 2026

The way people buy food and drink changed for good, and food and beverage ecommerce has climbed ever since. The global market sat at roughly $765 billion in 2025 and is projected to pass $1.68 trillion by 2030, a pace few consumer sectors can match. Online now accounts for about a fifth of sales at a company the size of Nestlé—a useful marker for how far digital has traveled in food.

Most coverage of food ecommerce trends stops at grocery and retail. That misses where the pressure is building. As B2B demand follows the B2C lead, every trend here lands on suppliers too—beverage manufacturers, food and beverage distributors, foodservice suppliers and multi-channel FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods, or CPG) brands.

Below are seven ecommerce food trends to watch in 2026, each with a current figure and a plain read on what it means for a B2B supplier, plus where to start once the trends stop being news and become a plan.

• The food and beverage ecommerce market is heading from ~$765bn (2025) toward ~$1.68tn by 2030; online is already about a fifth of a giant like Nestlé's sales.
• B2B is the faster story: B2B food and beverage ecommerce is set to grow from ~$297bn (2025) to ~$1.15tn by 2034.
• Self-service ordering is the headline trend—De Klok reached 80%+ B2B adoption on Virto Commerce, and even AB InBev now takes 72% of its revenue through B2B digital platforms.
• More than 80% of retail and FMCG firms use or pilot AI, but clean product data has to come first.
• Mobile ordering, replenishment, D2C, traceability and marketplaces round out the seven—each with a direct B2B implication.
• Suppliers can't file these under retail curiosities; they're requirements for digital ordering and product data.

A few forces sit under the growth number:

1. Convenience hardened into habit through the 2020s.
2. A generation of buyers now researches and orders online by default.
3. And B2B customers increasingly bring consumer expectations into their day jobs, which is where the pressure on suppliers comes from.

The B2B side is the faster mover: B2B food and beverage ecommerce is forecast to climb from about $297 billion in 2025 to $1.15 trillion by 2034, a steeper curve than the market as a whole.

Grocery and FMCG still set the headlines—online grocery keeps taking share, and food is the largest single slice of the FMCG market. But the food and beverage industry trends worth watching now sit on the supply side. When a buyer can reorder in seconds from one supplier, the distributor down the road still taking orders by phone feels the difference fast.

The biggest ecommerce food trends in 2026 are self-service ordering, AI, mobile-first route-to-market, replenishment, direct-to-consumer, traceability and marketplaces. They run across grocery and foodservice as much as wholesale distribution, and the order below roughly tracks how directly each one lands on a B2B supplier—starting with the change already rewriting how orders get placed.

Restaurants, retailers and offices now expect to order stock the way they order everything else: online, at any hour, without waiting for a sales rep. De Klok Dranken, one of the largest Dutch beverage wholesalers, is proof the change has reached deep into the trade: after replatforming onto Virto Commerce from Adobe Commerce (Magento), it reached 80%+ adoption among its B2B customers. The same holds at the top of the market—AB InBev's B2B platform BEES carried 72% of the brewer's revenue by the end of 2025, running in 29 markets with $52.5 billion sold through it that year. Self-service ordering has moved from a perk to a default.

For B2B suppliers: buyers want a portal that shows their own prices, live stock and one-tap reorder. Give them that, and repeat business stops depending on a sales rep picking up the phone.

Ask how technology is changing food ecommerce in 2026 and the honest answer is: AI went from pilot to production. More than 80% of retail and FMCG companies are now using or testing generative AI, with demand forecasting the most common use. In the storefront it powers search, auto-categorization and order assistants that keep thousands of SKUs tidy without manual tagging.

Among B2B sellers specifically, 22% have fully implemented gen AI capabilities, while another 31% are actively adopting the technology.

For B2B suppliers: AI pays off fastest on large, messy catalogs, where AI categorization sorts products and attributes that would take a team weeks by hand. One caveat runs through every rollout: clean data comes first.

👉 In the Thought Leader session on HEINEKEN's digital transformation, the lesson was data hygiene before AI, not the other way round.

Field teams, van sales and HoReCa (hotel, restaurant, café) buyers work from a phone, not a desk. HEINEKEN's mobile-first B2B platform shows what that unlocks in fragmented, traditional-trade markets: rolled out to 370,000+ users across 25+ countries, it drove a tenfold rise in online transactions. For fragmented retail—thousands of small outlets ordering little and often—a mobile order flow that works offline is the difference between a captured order and a missed one.

For B2B suppliers: ordering has to travel with the buyer, on the shop floor or in the cab of a delivery van. Field reps and foodservice customers will not open a laptop to top up stock, so route-to-market coverage lives or dies on the mobile experience.

Repeat buying is the most predictable revenue a food business has. Subscription ecommerce is on track to more than double, from about $180 billion in 2025 to $402 billion by 2031, and food and beverage is its single largest category. Auto-replenishment—the workhorse behind “subscribe and save”—accounts for roughly a third of that spend.

For B2B suppliers: the trade equivalent of subscribe-and-save is the standing order. Bulk orders and reorder-from-history turn a weekly restock into two taps, through order templates, back-in-stock alerts and repeat-from-last-order. Repeatability is stickiness, and stickiness is margin.

Manufacturers that once sold only through distributors are opening direct channels—subscription coffee, DTC pet food, brand webshops—to learn who their customers actually are. AB InBev's direct-to-consumer ecosystem alone brought in $1.3 billion in 2025. The pull is data and margin rather than volume.

For B2B suppliers: a direct channel rarely replaces the trade one; it runs alongside it. The real test is whether one platform can carry both—wholesale accounts on contract pricing and consumers paying list—without running two systems in parallel. Lavazza by Bluespresso runs B2B and B2C from one catalog and storefront.

Shoppers want to know where their food comes from, and they will change brands to find out. A Deloitte survey found 71% of consumers treat traceability as important and will pay a premium for it, while more than half of European shoppers say there is too little sustainability information on food today. The demand lands squarely on data: origin, ingredients, allergens and certifications.

For B2B suppliers: rich, accurate product data is the groundwork. A supplier that cannot hand structured attributes to its retail and foodservice customers cannot help them meet the same expectations downstream—which is why product information management (PIM) now sits at the center of the stack, not the edge.

Distribution is consolidating onto marketplaces. Roughly 65% of B2B ecommerce value now runs through marketplace channels rather than single-supplier contracts, as buyers reward supplier choice and transparent pricing. In food, that shows up as buying groups, foodservice marketplaces and distributor-run platforms that list third-party lines beside their own.

For B2B suppliers: the choice is to join someone else's marketplace, build your own, or do both. A distributor that can host third-party sellers turns its catalog into a destination and keeps the customer relationship, rather than handing it to a bigger platform.