Why fruit and vegetables can influence trust far beyond the fresh department, especially as grocery moves online in Qatar

A grocery order can be 96% correct and still disappoint the customer.

Imagine an online basket containing 25 products. Twenty-four arrive exactly as expected. The packaged products are correct, the delivery is on time and the payment experience works perfectly.

But the tomatoes are soft.

Operationally, the order looks successful. From the customer’s perspective, something different may have happened: “I won’t buy vegetables from this store next time.”

That gap between operational accuracy and customer perception is one reason I think fresh produce deserves to be viewed differently.

Fruit and vegetables are not simply another line in the grocery P&L. They can become one of the signals customers use to decide whether a retailer deserves their trust. And as grocery moves further online, that question becomes even more interesting.

Fresh is judged differently from packaged grocery

A packaged SKU is largely predictable. If a customer orders a particular bottle of water, cereal or detergent, the retailer’s main task is to provide the correct product in acceptable condition.

Fresh produce contains another layer of judgement. Two tomatoes carrying the same SKU can have different firmness. Two mangoes can be at completely different stages of ripeness. Two packs of berries can have very different usable lives.

The product can therefore be technically correct and experientially wrong.

This distinction matters commercially because customers judge fresh at more than one moment. They judge it on the shelf. They judge it when they open the bag. And they may judge it again several days later.

McKinsey’s European fresh-quality study captured this point. In addition to overall product quality, “products that stay fresh long after purchase” had a derived-importance score of 0.54. Taste, texture and juiciness also emerged as important fruit-quality attributes, connected partly to variety, ripeness, sourcing and operating execution. [1]

Part of the quality promise lives in the customer’s refrigerator.

In fresh, lowest price is not the whole value proposition

Price matters in grocery. Pretending otherwise would be unrealistic. But lowest price and best customer value are not necessarily the same thing.

McKinsey’s 2017 European Retail Benchmark on Fresh Quality surveyed 23,000 shoppers across more than 30 stores in France, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Its derived-importance analysis found high product quality at 0.72, compared with 0.50 for price-to-quality, 0.48 for promotions and 0.39 for having the lowest everyday prices. These are correlation-based importance scores, not percentages. [1]

That does not mean consumers ignore prices. Deloitte’s 2023 US fresh-food research still identified price as the leading purchase consideration. At the same time, 68% of surveyed consumers said they were willing to pay a premium for the best fresh food. [2]

The useful commercial distinction is therefore not “price or quality?” It is: what value proposition gives customers sufficient confidence in both?

A promotion can encourage trial. A competitive price can protect value perception. Neither can make an overripe avocado good again.

Customers may judge hundreds of SKUs through a handful of products

One of the most useful concepts in McKinsey’s research is the Key Quality Item, or KQI.

Its research found that perception of the fresh department was often disproportionately influenced by fewer than ten products. A KQI combines two characteristics: many customers buy it, and customers pay close attention to its quality and can distinguish good from poor execution. [1]

The actual products changed by country and season. Bananas were particularly important in several European markets. Tomatoes mattered strongly in Germany, lettuce in Switzerland and potatoes in the United Kingdom. [1]

This gives grocery leaders a more useful question than simply asking whether the fresh assortment is good: Which products are customers using to judge us?

That question should be answered locally. For Qatar, I would not simply import the European KQI list. Household composition, cuisines, sourcing patterns, seasonality and shopping missions are different.

A proper Qatar analysis should identify the intersection between basket penetration and quality sensitivity, then determine the handful of products that disproportionately influence perception. Tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, bananas, apples, herbs and leafy greens are reasonable candidates to test, but they should not be presented as a measured ranking without local consumer data.

Instead of trying to make every fresh SKU equally exceptional, management can understand which products simply cannot be allowed to fail.

Qatar makes fresh execution a supply-chain question

Qatar gives this discussion another dimension.

The National Food Security Strategy 2030 explicitly includes food safety and quality, stronger domestic production, resilient supply chains and diversified international sourcing among its priorities. [3]

Domestic agriculture has expanded. According to the Ministry of Municipality’s 2025 achievements as reported by The Peninsula, 950 productive farms supplied local markets and vegetable output reached about 75,000 tonnes in 2025. [4]

At the same time, Qatar remains highly connected to international food supply chains. HBKU research notes that more than 90% of the country’s food requirements are imported from overseas markets. [5]

Those facts should not be interpreted as “local equals quality” or “imported equals poor quality.” That would be simplistic and unsupported.

They point to something operationally more useful: Qatar’s fresh proposition depends on the ability to manage quality across different origins, lead times and supply-chain structures.

A tomato can start on a local farm or travel through an international sourcing network. Either can provide excellent quality. What matters to the customer is what survives the journey.

Online grocery transfers product judgement to the retailer

The digital channel changes fresh retail more profoundly than it changes many packaged categories.

In a physical supermarket, customers can look at the product, compare alternatives, judge firmness and ripeness, and leave anything they do not want behind.

Online, the customer gives up much of that control.

The order might simply say: Bananas, 1 kg.

But the customer’s expectation may really mean: not overripe, no significant bruising, similar size, and something the household can use over the next few days.

The app captures the SKU. Someone still has to interpret the quality.

The customer transfers part of the selection decision to the retailer, picker or fulfilment operation.

Research supports the underlying problem. A 2021 Horticulturae study on e-grocery and fresh fruit identified consumers’ inability to assess produce quality online as a significant factor behind the slower online adoption of fresh produce. [6]

This is especially relevant in Qatar because e-grocery is already meaningful. McKinsey’s State of Grocery Retail MENA 2026 surveyed more than 5,520 consumers across five markets and found that Qatar had the highest e-grocery share at 11.4%. It also reported that 44% of consumers in Qatar intended to buy more groceries online in 2025, the highest level among the markets studied. [7]

For a supermarket or neighbourhood grocery operating through an aggregator, that creates an important reality. The app may belong to the platform. The delivery driver may belong to another organisation. But when damaged strawberries arrive, the produce still carries the store’s reputation.

The Fresh Trust Chain: quality is an end-to-end operating outcome

A poor tomato is not necessarily a supplier problem. It could be a specification problem. Or forecasting. Or receiving. Or temperature. Or excess inventory. Or rotation. Or handling. Or picking.

McKinsey similarly treats fresh quality as a cross-functional issue involving the value proposition, merchandising, sourcing and supply chain, store operations and shrink management. It also observes that quality problems and shrink can sometimes share root causes, such as poor demand planning or suboptimal sourcing. [1]

A useful way to think about this is what I call the Fresh Trust Chain:

1. Specify

Define what “good” actually means. Variety, size, maturity, acceptable defects, appearance and expected customer use should inform the specification rather than buying solely to a commodity description.

2. Preserve

Protect that specification through sourcing, transportation, receiving, storage, temperature management and inventory planning. Quality cannot be inspected back into a product after it has been lost.

3. Present

Manage replenishment, rotation, display and handling so that good inbound product remains good at the point of sale.

4. Select

For online orders, choose the product the way a reasonable customer would. Picker training becomes part of the value proposition, not simply a fulfilment task.

5. Survive

Ask whether the product delivers acceptable usable life after purchase. The customer’s experience continues at home.

These five stages turn “freshness” from a vague promise into an operating question: Where in our Fresh Trust Chain are we losing quality?

The commercial question is bigger than fresh margin

Retailers already measure fresh through important operational metrics: sales, margin, availability, stock turn, shrink and waste. All of those should remain.

But they do not completely describe the category’s commercial contribution.

McKinsey connects strong fresh performance with traffic, customer satisfaction and perceptions of other departments. Its 2018 research described a halo effect and reported from its experience that some fresh-quality programmes had generated more than 10% year-on-year department sales growth even in flat markets. That figure is an experience-based result, not a guaranteed benchmark. [1]

The next measurement layer should therefore ask:

• Which fresh products disproportionately influence customer perception?
• What happens to a customer’s fresh spending after a quality complaint?
• Does the total basket subsequently change?
• What percentage of refunds originates in a small set of KQIs?
• Are online quality complaints concentrated by picker, store, product or time of day?
• How much usable life is the customer actually receiving?
• Are shrink and poor quality coming from the same forecasting or inventory problem?

This is where fresh becomes commercially interesting. A refund is visible. The customer who quietly stops adding vegetables to future baskets is harder to see. The customer who eventually changes stores is harder still.

We should therefore be cautious about claiming a direct causal chain from one poor tomato to complete customer churn without specific data. But it is commercially reasonable to measure whether that chain exists.

Fresh is where the promise becomes physical

A hypermarket may carry tens of thousands of products. A neighbourhood grocery may compete primarily on convenience. An aggregator may win through speed and digital experience. But eventually someone opens the shopping bag.

At that moment, strategy becomes physical.

That is why I would not evaluate fruit and vegetables only through their own sales and gross margin. Their wider commercial value may also sit in the visits they attract, the confidence they create across the basket, and the customer relationship they help protect.

And online, there is an additional responsibility.

When customers cannot choose the tomato themselves, they are not just buying the tomato. They are buying the retailer’s judgement.

For commercial and grocery leaders, that may be one of the most useful reasons to look at fresh differently.

I am continuing to explore how customer experience, category economics and operating execution intersect in modern retail. If you work close to fresh retail or e-grocery in Qatar or the GCC, I would be interested in how you see the same challenge.

Questions Grocery Leaders Should Be Asking

Before the FAQ, I would insert this small executive box. It makes the article more useful and gives AI/search engines strong semantic context.

Do we know which fresh products customers use to judge our store?

Are we managing quality with the same discipline that we manage price and promotions?

When fresh quality fails, do we know whether the problem began in sourcing, forecasting, logistics, store execution or picking?

For online orders, are our pickers selecting products the way customers would select them themselves?

Do we measure only refunds and complaints, or can we see when part of the customer’s future basket quietly moves elsewhere?

Are we measuring how long fresh products remain usable after they reach the customer’s home?

These are not only fresh-department questions.

They are commercial questions.

Frequently Asked Questions

Keep this to five or six questions maximum.

Why is fresh produce important for a supermarket?

Fresh produce is highly visible, variable in quality and purchased frequently. Research from McKinsey found that the perceived quality of fruit and vegetables can influence satisfaction with the fresh department and may also create a halo effect on customers’ perception of other parts of the store. This makes fresh potentially important not only for category sales, but also for traffic, trust and the broader shopping experience.

Does fresh quality matter more than price?

Price remains important in grocery retail, but lowest price is not the same as best value. In McKinsey’s European fresh-quality research, high product quality had a higher derived-importance score for fresh-department satisfaction than price-to-quality, promotions or lowest everyday prices. This does not mean price is unimportant. It suggests that retailers competing only on price may overlook a major part of the fresh value proposition.

What are Key Quality Items in grocery retail?

Key Quality Items, or KQIs, are products that combine high basket penetration with high customer sensitivity to quality. McKinsey’s research found that fewer than ten products could sometimes have a disproportionate influence on customers’ perception of an entire fruit-and-vegetable department. The specific products vary by market and season.

Why is selling fresh produce online more difficult?

In a physical store, customers can inspect, compare and personally select fruit and vegetables. Online, part of that judgement transfers to the retailer, picker or fulfilment team. Quality selection, ripeness, handling, substitutions and usable life therefore become part of the digital customer experience.

What should grocery retailers measure in fresh?

Traditional measures such as sales, gross margin, availability, stock turn, waste and shrink remain essential. Retailers may also benefit from measuring fresh complaints, refund frequency, repeat fresh purchase, quality of important KQIs, picker performance, usable life after purchase and changes in basket behaviour following a poor fresh experience.

What could be Qatar’s most important fresh quality items?

Products such as tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, onions, bananas, apples, citrus, herbs and leafy vegetables may be candidates because of their everyday relevance and visible quality characteristics. However, a Qatar-specific KQI ranking should be based on actual consumer and basket research rather than assumed from international studies.

Research and Transparency Note

I strongly recommend adding this because it makes the article safer and more credible, especially now that readers know AI can produce convincing-looking research.

You can use this exact wording:

About the Research

This article combines published research, publicly available Qatar market information and my commercial interpretation of the implications for grocery retail.

The McKinsey research referenced in the article studied 23,000 shoppers across more than 30 retail stores in France, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Findings from that study should therefore be understood within their original geographic and methodological context rather than treated as Qatar-specific consumer results.

Where Qatar-specific evidence is available, it has been identified separately. Concepts such as potential Qatar Key Quality Items and possible customer basket migration are presented as areas for further research rather than established local findings.

References and source notes

[1] McKinsey & Company – Daniel Laubli and Nora Ottink, “In fresh-food retailing, quality matters more than price,” 2018. Research based on 23,000 shoppers in 30+ stores across France, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Official source

[2] Deloitte, “Fresh Food Key Ingredient to Grocers’ Growth,” 2023. Official source

[3] Government Communications Office, State of Qatar, “Prime Minister launches the National Food Security Strategy 2030,” 12 December 2024. Official source

[4] The Peninsula Qatar, “Local vegetable output hits 75,000 tonnes in 2025,” 2 January 2026, reporting Ministry of Municipality achievements. Official source

[5] Hamad Bin Khalifa University research portal, food-security research noting Qatar imports over 90% of its food requirements from overseas markets. Official source

[6] Park, Luo, Trouth and Fonseca, “Charting the Future of E-Grocery: An Evaluation of the Use of Digital Imagery as a Sensory Analysis Tool for Fresh Fruits,” Horticulturae, 2021. Official source

[7] McKinsey & Company, “State of grocery retail MENA 2026: Managing the growth paradox,” 25 February 2026. Official source

Evidence note: The attached McKinsey PDF supplied for this article is the primary source for the 23,000-shopper benchmark, derived-importance scores, KQI concept, halo effect, quality-after-purchase findings, and the quality/shrink operating logic. Candidate Qatar KQIs in this article are hypotheses to validate, not a completed consumer ranking.