Crises precautions: Analysing changes in consumer behaviour – A Romanian food retailer’s perspective

The food retail industry has experienced significant transformations during recent crises, including the pandemic, energy crisis, and armed conflicts. These events generated substantial socio-economic challenges for both companies and consumers, directly influencing purchasing behaviour and relational dynamics with brands and products. For instance, mobility restrictions during the pandemic forced consumers to reconsider how they purchased food and non-food items. Concurrently, armed conflicts and the energy crisis severely disrupted supply chains and store operations, requiring retailers to adapt quickly to meet shifting consumer needs and shortages. Many consumers rapidly abandoned previous shopping routines for online purchasing, mandating retailers to rapidly develop strategic responses to these changes. To explore the consequences of recent crises on food retail in Romania, an emerging market, and to show how retailers managed to adapt and implement new strategies based on the lessons learned, in 2025, the authors conducted in-depth interviews with food retail representatives. The aim was to identify transformations in consumer behaviour during the crises. Interview data were processed and analysed, combining text analytics (word frequency, associations, sentiment analysis, clustering) with thematic coding. Respondents consistently emphasised changes in consumer experience, increased adoption of online channels, precautionary behaviours such as stockpiling, and periods of panic buying. The findings provide an integrated perspective on how food retailers perceived and managed changes in consumer behaviour during the crises. Rather than establishing statistical causal effects, the research highlights consistent thematic patterns and emerging themes that link the crises situations to shifts in consumption and food retail strategies. The paper thus contributes to ongoing discussions on consumer behaviour dynamics under uncertainty, extending the methodological use of cluster analysis in food retail contexts, and adding interpretive insights in line with the dynamic capabilities theory.