Abstract:

The paper highlights the notion of innovation in food retailing, showing its essence, the trend influencing innovation in food retailing, as well as innovation drivers and barriers in retailing. Furthermore the paper highlights the Polish food retailing market, concentrating on the biggest retailing chains, from the perspective of total income. It is worth underlining that the chains represent the different store formats existing in the market. Finally the chosen chains, representing discount supermarkets, convenience stores and compact hypermarkets are analyzed from the perspective of the innovation used by them in the Polish market. The purpose is to show how diverse the innovation and what are there key drivers. In the conclusions the author tries to reply the question about the future tendencies in food retailing innovation in Poland.