Figures published by Mintel this week suggest that there could be as much as a 33 per cent uptick in the number of grocery orders placed via safe shopping online this year, meaning that the market will be worth almost £17 billion in the UK alone.

Internet Retailing reports that this is in stark contrast with how online grocery sales fared in 2019, when there was a tiny rise of 2.9 per cent, which at the time caused many analysts to assume that there had been a marked plateau in consumer demand.

This unprecedented rise in web-based grocery sales is yet another of the indicators that COVID-19 is having a significant impact on consumer habits, and furthermore many industry experts believe that these changes will not simply be reversed once bricks and mortar stores reopen but could in fact be in place for good.

While online grocery delivery slots quickly filled up in the days following the rollout of the national lockdown back in March, initially it seemed that only a small proportion of the British population had actually decided to stop visiting bricks and mortar stores to buy essential consumables. This has changed as the lockdown has stretched on and been extended, just as the public have been made aware of the true extent of the risk that coronavirus poses to the health of the nation as a whole.

Today 36 per cent of people say that they have increased the amount of their shopping which they carry out via e-commerce sites, with the suggestion being that this is partly due to necessity but also as a result of fears that visits to real-world outlets will dramatically raise the likelihood of contracting a virus which has left so many casualties in its wake.