DEVELOPMENT PROBLEMS OF FORMS OF RETAIL BUSINESS UNITS IN FOOD SECTOR IN THE REPUBLIC OF CROATIA

The paper starts with the importance of the study of forms of retail business units in the food sector in the Republic of Croatia with respect to shares of stores with mainly food products (grocery stores) in overall retail, and also considering the negative balance of foreign trade balance sheet in this sector due to competition of more efficient foreign retail value chains. A particular problem in this sector in the Republic of Croatia is also a lower level of effectiveness of certain forms of retail business unit in relation to a market and economically more developed European countries. The hypothesis of this paper is that in the Republic of Croatia the development of more efficient retail business unit is required, which will compete with new business models and develop new relationships in distribution channels, respectively in the value chains. To highlight the development problems of forms of retail business units in the food sector in the Republic of Croatia, this paper provides a comparison of the retail food sector with Germany (in some areas with Austria) with respect to: (a) the degree of concentration, (b) development in quantitative terms, (c) development in terms of quality (structure of the main forms of retail business units) and (d)efficiency (measured with generated traffic per unit of sales area).