State of the GF Market, Report 1 – GFTECH Report
This report considers the differences in the Australian and US GF markets through analysis of consumer electronic demand or Google Internet searches.
Basic macroeconomics suggests that markets are governed by principles of supply and demand. However, marketing suggests that good providers find where the demand is, then create and market products or services to it. It would seem that the increase in searches for ‘gluten-free foods’ (in the last year) is beginning to be reflected in the increase in providers of products and services.
While the GF production side of the market is well underway in the US and Australia, it still remains a niche market with many celiacs unaware they have the disease. While Australia tends to follow American trends, this article looks at the difference between countries with regard to search habits and therefore demand for GF products and services.
First of all, there is obviously a difference in the spelling of the disease in each country. Australia spells it as ‘celiac’, while the US uses ‘celiac’. During this research it was discovered that while the majority of Australians use the celiac spelling, a large number still use the American version. Americans only look up the American spelling.
While Australians look for products that are gluten-free and ‘gluten-free dairy’, the US does not associate the two.
In both countries people search for topics like ‘gluten-free recipes’. While this may not logically sound like they are searching for ‘GF recipes’, GF recipe sites dominate the search results and confirm that this is a ‘learned shortcut’ that people are using.
The top 20 terms (excluding spelling differences) searched by both countries are very similar. Since individual terms vary from month to month, it is less instructive to compare individual terms rather than GROUP terms. For this reason, the main search terms are grouped as follows:
- Gluten-free foods = 6
- Gluten-free diet = 2
- Gluten Free Recipes = 3
- Related celiac = 2
- Related free wheat = 4
Group Membership:
GF Foods – This group of search terms involves the word GF and has to do with phrases regarding GF foods.
Gluten-free diet: These are terms that are related to the specifics of gluten-free diets.
GF Recipe – GF Meal Cooking Related Website and Searches.
Related to Celiac: For Australia, four terms are considered: two for each of the celiac/coeliac spellings. In the US, although the same two terms are compared (only the celiac spelling), a third celiac-related term is included in the total volumes. Except for the specific term ‘GF’, celiac related terms have by far the highest search volumes.
Wheat Free Group: For both Australia and the US, these terms fall outside the top ten search volumes for gluten-related terms.
Search volume analysis
The first point is that the population of Australia is close to 20 million, while that of the US is close to 300 million. So the US has almost 15 times the Australian population, and yet Australian search terms only need to be multiplied by 10 to be highly comparable. This suggests that, by population, Australians are 50% more interested in searching for GF terms.
It’s amazing how similar the keyword groups for Australia and the US compare. While Australian and American food and culture are similar, this shadow of groups is phenomenal.
Although the ‘GF Foods’ group contains six sentences, it is easily the most frequently searched group of all GF-related searches in the top 20 searches. The Celiac Top Phrase group accounts for only half of the search volumes of the volumes in the ‘Food GF’ group; however, the group only consists of two terms. This suggests that, per sentence, in both Australia and the US, there is almost equal interest in people seeking information on ‘gluten-free foods’ as in seeking information on the disease.
By comparison, there is relatively low overall interest in the ‘gluten-free diet’ group and the ‘gluten-free recipe’ group, judging by how few deviations from the terms exist. However, all three Australian ‘GF recipe’ terms cluster in the top ten of searches and closer to the top of searches compared to the US terms. Both of these groups could be considered a niche area and a subset of what people would find when using search terms in the large ‘GF foods’ group anyway.
The ‘wheat free’ group is made up of four terms. Two of the terms are substitutes for the terms “gluten-free foods” and two are based on issues related to allergies. This shows that most people prefer to search directly for ‘gluten-free foods’ rather than ‘wheat-free’. Also for issues related to the disease, most people are still looking for information on celiac rather than wheat intolerance.
In November, the total number of Google searches for the top terms related to ‘gluten-free food’ was 316,000 in Australia, compared to just over 3 million in the US. Again, this is a factor of 10. , while the US is 15 times more populous than Australia.
Considering the US population is approximately 300 million, 1 in 100 people have celiac disease. That would mean that, on average, one GF term is searched for every celiac in the US. In Australia, a population of 20 million would mean about 1.6 searches per celiac.
Research suggests that different breeds have different susceptibilities to the disease, which in the US would reduce the overall CD rate to 1 in 133. Even if this were the case, CD generally has very low diagnostic rates. In fact, from a recent GF program in Melbourne, it appears that there may be as many people who are gluten intolerant or simply choose GF for health reasons as there are people diagnosed with CD.
Google says that for “food and drink” sites, a referral rate of new visitors is 71% of all visits. From observations and these facts, it would appear that only a small number of celiac and gluten-intolerant individuals are seeking information on gluten-free foods, but they do so on a reasonable monthly basis.