Hand Held food continues to gain popularity.

In NPD Group’s 2011 report on Eating Patterns in America famed food industry research and speaker Harry Balzer found that Hand Held food lead the category of which food we ate more of this year than ever before both at home and at restaurants.

 The foods and beverages U.S. consumers ate more of last year than ever before:

In-Home Meals

Pizza

• Fruit
• Salty Snacks
• Yogurt

Restaurant-Purchased Meals
Breakfast Sandwiches

• Hot Cereal
• Snacks Burritos

Regular readers of this blog will not surprise by Mr. Balzer findings on Hand Held foods.  What we found most interesting is he confirmed our findings with regards to Ready-2-eat and Heat-N-eat fresh and prepared food.  He found …”While consumers are less likely to use a "fresh" product to prepare dinner at home than they have been since NPD began tracking this in 1985”.

Meal assembly is another recurring theme on this blog.  Clearly retailers must react to consumer demand for fresh prepared ready-2-eat and heat-N-eat in order to maintain consumer relevance.

Since 1991 retail food consultancy Foodservice Solutions® of Tacoma, WA has been the global leader in the Grocerant niche for more on Foodservice Solutions® Bing or Google Grocerants or visit http://www.linkedin.com/in/grocerant, twitter.com/grocerant Email: grocerant@q.com