By Grace Zawadi and Jenny Luesby

European shoppers are buying fewer groceries in 2026, putting Kenyan horticultural exporters under pressure from falling demand in their largest markets.

Europe is Kenya’s biggest market for fresh fruit, vegetables and flowers, with the UK, Netherlands, Germany and France accounting for two-thirds of its horticultural sales.

But in all four countries, the volume of food consumers are buying is falling, prompting food retailers to increase prices to maintain their incomes.

The sharpest fall in 2026 was in Germany in March, when the volume of food sales fell by 2.7 per cent compared with the previous month, and by 3.3 per cent compared with March 2025. But the trend has been downwards across the continent.

In France, where a third of all food is bought in large hypermarkets, the hypermarkets have reported falling sales volumes every year since 2022, while in 2026, the smaller and more local supermarkets that sell another one third of the food supply reported a 1.5 per cent decline in volumes for the first half of the year.

Similarly, in the Netherlands, where supermarkets sell two-thirds of the country’s food consumption, volumes fell by 3.9 per cent in 2025, with no evidence yet of any volume rebound this year.

UK grocery sales are also falling, with the industry’s leading news magazine, the Grocer, reporting this year from Sentinel Management Consultants that the months of consecutive decline reflected shoppers buying less, trading down, and skipping non-essentials altogether.

This follows several years of declining fruit and vegetable sales across the region, with commentators citing reduced home cooking as the main reason for the longer-term move away from fresh produce.

But it has also hit UK outlets, where the strategy to counter that slower decline was to push up premium fresh consumables such as berries and avocados.

The factors now affecting those sales as well are most strongly tied to falling disposable income. 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 led to a sharp rise in energy costs across Europe, with energy use most heavy from October to May, for home heating during the continent’s cold months. The new war in the Middle East added further rises to heating and fuel costs from February this year.

At the same time, the continent is now being blighted by hundreds of thousands of AI-related job cuts, as human jobs are replaced by automated AI, cutting 10 per cent and up to 20 per cent of many companies’ work forces. Amazon announced almost 30,000 job cuts in late 2025 and early 2026, while Microsoft, Oracle, DBS and hundreds of other companies have unveiled thousands of AI-related redundancies.

Economists have found these redundancies cause immediate cuts in family food spending of around 15 per cent.

For horticultural exporters, this fresh produce pressure is not set to ease until the Russian and Middle East wars are concluded, and new post-AI employment opportunities emerge. But pivoting to restaurants, fast food chains and food processors may offer a slower decline by accessing the steadily increased proportion of spending on pre-made food by employed Europeans, and the continent’s higher earners.

In mid-2025, the Netherlands and the UK accounted for 35.1 per cent and 14.3 per cent of Kenya’s fresh produce exports in mid-2025, followed by France at 7.9 per cent and Germany at 6.4 per cent, meaning the reduced buying across all four countries is affecting almost two-thirds of the country’s horticultural sales.