The amount of groceries sold over the internet is expected to double in the next five years, according to new research that suggests that one in ten shoppers will no longer visit a supermarket by 2012.

IGD, the grocery market research organisation, predicts that sales of groceries online will reach £5 billion in five years’ time, although this will still be a small fraction of the £156 billion expected value of the total grocery market. At present only 2 per cent of groceries are sold online and that would rise to just over 3 per cent by 2012, according to the IGD’s figures.

Grocery retailers said that they believed IGD’s predictions were conservative and that online grocery sales, which are increasing by about 30 per cent a year, could double within the next three years. Jason Gissing, co-founder of Ocado, which sells Waitrose groceries online, said: “When we set up the business in 2000, we used to have a arguments all the time about whether people would buy their groceries online. Now no one says they won’t buy food - it’s about what percentage want to buy.”

Tesco, by far the biggest online grocer in the UK, sells £1.23 billion of groceries online – about 3½ times the level achieved five years ago. Last year its online grocery sales rose by about 30 per cent.

Those sales make up nearly 5 per cent of Tesco’s UK business and Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive, said recently: “It has taken ten years to go from 0 to 5 per cent of our business and that percentage will increase at a faster rate as we start to drive the network.”

One way in which Tesco plans to drive online sales is by opening online-only stores – effectively small depots that will be the base for internet deliveries in localities where Tesco is unable to get planning permission to enlarge or add ordinary supermarkets.

Tesco has one such outlet operating in Croydon, South London, and is planning to add another in Kent next year. Sir Terry argues that delivering groceries is good for the environment because each van journey saves a number of car trips to the supermarket.

Mr Gissing said that the market would grow naturally because improvements to technology would combine with changes to consumer habits as teenagers and the twenty-something generation who are familiar with the internet, computer games and social networking sites settle down and have families.

Half of British adults have broad-band at home, up from only 7 per cent in 2002, internet connections are faster and more reliable and retailers have made their sites easier to use and have improved their delivery services.

Mr Gissing said: “I’m not saying the internet is going to replace physical retailing – people still like to see products – but for a huge percentage of people grocery shopping is a pain – they are buying the same stuff every week. They can do that online and add something interesting from a local deli or bread shop."

More than 40 per cent of those questioned by IGD said they would use specialist stores, such as butchers, to buy at least part of their weekly food shop. Nearly 10 per cent said that they would not visit a supermarket in ten years’ time because they would do all their grocery shopping online. Gavin Rothwell, of IGD, said: “Recent social and technological changes now mean that logging on for the weekly shop is rapidly becoming routine for ever-greater numbers of Britons.”

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