H
ello Team,
2020 was a year like no other and Sprouts emerged stronger than ever. On behalf of the entire leadership team, thank you for your tireless work serving our customers and our communities. Your dedication throughout 2020 ensured our customers had access to healthy food to feed their families through challenging times while placing us on an even stronger foundation for future success.
Our Performance
We had a fantastic 2020! Our results are as follows: net sales grew 15% to $6.5 billion, and we had comparable-store sales of 6.9%, compared to 2019. Clearly, we have had some tailwinds from COVID, however, executing our strategic initiatives at a more rapid pace than we originally planned is fueling these encouraging results and establishing a solid base from which we can invest and grow.
For the fourth quarter 2020, our net sales grew 17% to $1.6 billion, and comparable-store sales were up 3.7%, compared to the same period last year.
Our shift from print to digital marketing advertising during the year not only had a positive environmental impact by averting 60,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, it helped draw customers to shop.sprouts.com and continues to gain traction as we meet our customer in whatever way they like to shop, whether in-store, pick-up, or through home delivery. As a result, e-commerce sales remain strong, growing nearly 15% of our total sales, up more than 290% compared to last year.
Your efforts encouraging customers to sign up for the Sprouts app through the Sign-Up Showdown Contest increased downloading of the app by nearly 60% and helped grow our customer database, which will allow us to better share our great brand with more people.
Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is critical for our target customers, now more than ever, and this resulted in a 45% increase in alternative meat sales from brands like Beyond Meat, Impossible, and Daring—a trend that is likely to continue going forward. We saw customers putting more in their basket with strong trends through the year in frozen, dairy, meat, bakery, and grocery.
Innovation remains a top priority at Sprouts, as we position ourselves to be the leader for carrying and developing new natural and organic products. We successfully highlighted our own products during the holidays like pumpkin spice almond butter and dark coco kettle corn. Overall, 2020 brought more than 5,100 new brand and private label items that contributed more than 35% of our sales growth.
Looking Forward
This year, we will continue to deliver on our strategy of evolving our marketing program to increase our brand awareness, opening new stores to bring healthy food to more communities, and opening two new fresh distribution centers to bring fresher produce to our customers.
The marketing campaign that we launched last August continues to be a focus as we aim to increase brand awareness and reach more of our target customer base. Our focus on digital-driven communications will help us maximize customer data and reach our target customer.
We plan to open approximately 20 new stores, some of which will be in our new format with a smaller footprint of 25,000 square feet or less. We’ll continue highlighting our open layout and farmers market experience with produce at the center of the store, while providing expanded departments meaningful to our target customers, new signage to draw attention to our differentiated products, and an in-store innovation center.
We’re adding two new fresh DCs in Colorado and Florida, getting us closer to our goal of having our stores within 250 miles of our DCs, reducing the distance our produce travels to get to our shelves to keep our produce as fresh as possible and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Local DCs also help us reach our goal to expand the selection of unique seasonal produce and offer more local produce offerings.
We’ve made great strides in our strategy, and while we still have much to do, 2021 is off to a great start. I am excited about all that we are building on this great brand!
Thank you all again, and please take care of yourselves and take care of your families.