New Zealand grocery is worth roughly NZ$25 billion a year. Foodstuffs and Woolworths together hold about 82% of it. And 10% of suppliers account for 90% of the major supermarkets' wholesale purchases.
Those figures come from the Commerce Commission's work on grocery competition. The third one is the one worth sitting with, because it describes the room every supplier walks into.
What the concentration actually means
Across the major supermarkets' wholesale purchases, 10% of suppliers account for 90% of purchase value. Other suppliers are competing for the remainder, in category reviews focused on rate of sale per store per week.
If you are inside that tenth, the pressure is to defend space you already have. If you are outside it, the pressure is to prove that a listing would not cost the retailer money.
Both are evidence problems, and both are usually argued with the wrong evidence.
Foodstuffs is not a shop
How Foodstuffs is structured changes how you talk to buyers. Foodstuffs consists of two New Zealand-owned retailer co-operatives, Foodstuffs North Island and Foodstuffs South Island, whose member stores are owned and operated by local grocers.
The banners are New World, PAK'nSAVE and Four Square, with Raeward Fresh and On the Spot in the South Island, and Liquorland under Foodstuffs New Zealand. Part of each store's range is set locally by the owner-operator.
So sold at Foodstuffs is imprecise. Ranged by Foodstuffs North Island describes a co-op buying decision. Sold at New World describes what a shopper can actually find. The distinction matters when a claim has to be substantiated.
The evidence a buyer cannot argue with
Most supplier presentations lead with brand health: awareness, consideration, sentiment. All of it is contestable, because the buyer has their own data and it is closer to the till than yours.
The evidence that travels is evidence about behaviour, and specifically about shoppers of their banner.
- Verified trials, counted rather than estimated, with the retailer named where the purchase happened.
- Repeat behaviour after trial, which is the whole argument for a listing.
- Customer verbatims from real shoppers rather than a research panel.
- Paid performance that proves you can drive traffic into their store rather than to your website.
That is a different deliverable from an awareness campaign, and it is what purchase-first sampling is designed to produce.
Why local proof beats an overseas case study
A category manager in Auckland has been shown a lot of Australian and American results. They discount them, correctly, because the retail structures are different and the shopper is different.
Which is why one New Zealand campaign with counts attached is worth more in that room than a global deck. In a New Zealand campaign for Kiwicare Weed Weapon in December 2025, five Canterbury gardeners produced content that ran as paid media against the brand's own ads in the same campaign: 2.78% click-through against 1.07%, at NZ$0.20 a click.
Source: Kiwicare Campaign Report, January 2026.
Where smaller suppliers have room to move
Three places, none of which require a bigger trade spend.
Rate of sale in a small number of stores. Owner-operators have local range discretion, which means a store-level result is a real thing you can build, and a real thing you can show a co-op.
Bringing shoppers into their store rather than yours. Retail is the largest measured advertising category in New Zealand, at NZ$675.4 million in 2025 according to Nielsen Ad Intel, and the largest advertisers include Foodstuffs New Zealand and Woolworths. A supplier who can demonstrably drive traffic into those stores is solving a problem the retailer is already spending heavily on.
Content the retailer can use. Licensed customer content is usable in retail media, on product pages and in trade material. Most suppliers turn up with a sell sheet.
The uncomfortable conclusion
Concentration is not going to reverse. The realistic ambition for a smaller supplier is not to change the structure but to arrive with evidence the buyer cannot generate themselves, about their shoppers, in their stores.
The category rules that shape how that evidence can be gathered are on the food and beverage page, and the measurement side is on retail sales lift.