The German food market grew 2.8% in 2025. EDEKA, the market leader with a 14% share, grew at 2.1% (below the market average) and lost 0.1 percentage points of market share, according to YouGov figures reported by Lebensmittel Zeitung. REWE, at 12.1% market share, grew at 3.4% and gained ground on its largest competitor. Both companies are investing heavily in AI at the same time. Market share shifts at this scale are multifactorial, and a 0.1 percentage point move sits well within the noise of quarterly trading conditions. What makes the comparison worth examining is the structural gap in digital infrastructure that has opened between the two companies over the past years, and what that gap implies for the quality of assortment and pricing decisions each company will be making going forward.
Two Companies, Two AI Strategies
REWE and EDEKA both operate serious AI programs, but their strategic priorities differ significantly, and the gap in customer data infrastructure has now become so large that it is having consequences. REWE has moved faster on the customer-facing side. Its loyalty app, which the company operates independently rather than through a shared programme, has surpassed 11 million users. EDEKA, which introduced its Payback integration, exceeded its own target of 6 million users by the end of 2025; a strong result, but one that still leaves it running nearly half the digital reach of its primary competitor. That gap matters especially for assortment management, because first-party transaction data, tied to individual shopping behaviour across millions of baskets, is the raw material for downstream decisions in buying, category planning, and pricing. REWE has been building that asset for longer and at greater depth.
The Data Gap Behind the Market Share Gap
REWE's decision to build its own loyalty infrastructure, rather than share customer data with dozens of other Payback partners, reflects a strategic logic that goes well beyond cost savings. A proprietary programme, covering every transaction in every store, yields a complete picture of demand: which products drive basket value, which SKUs serve the same shopper occasion and generate internal competition, where price sensitivity clusters by segment. A shared programme yields a partial one. Over time, the quality of assortment and pricing decisions diverges accordingly.
EDEKA's strategic choices in 2025, the Payback integration and a push into new private labels, are the right direction, but could also seem like a catch-up position rather than a lead. The cooperative has been investing in supply chain AI as well, connecting ordering logic to demand signals at the store level to reduce stockouts and excess inventory. That investment addresses the back-end of the assortment problem. The front-end — understanding, at the individual product level, which items belong in the range and at what depth — requires the kind of customer data that REWE has spent several years building and EDEKA is now working to accumulate.
What German Grocery Is Actually Testing
The German food retail market is structurally the hardest environment in Europe to generate margin in. Price competition is intense, Aldi and Lidl set the value benchmark for the entire sector, and consumers are highly attuned to price signals. In such a tough margin environment, the company with the deeper data infrastructure is growing faster.
For retail executives, the more useful takeaway is not the market share number itself but the mechanism behind it: the retailer with a clearer, more complete picture of what its customers are actually buying makes better assortment decisions, prices more precisely, and compounds those advantages over time. That translation layer, from customer data to assortment quality to commercial outcome, is exactly where the competitive gap in retail will be decided over the next several years. It is also the problem that Zenline's agents are built to solve for category teams who want to close it before it becomes structural.