Restaurants Customer Discontinuity Growing

The Grocery store sector Achilles Heel has long been time.  Most consumers don’t want to spend the time to walk around the store looking for the 7 or 8 items that they need.  After all most consumers buy only 100 different items from the grocery store per year, they buy those items over and over again. 

Saving time has become a valued reason for shopping at new venues including convenience stores as they are building loyalty by offering shoppers convenient and effortless ways to get the products, meals and meal components for Take-Out they want, in the shortest time possible according to Foodservice Solutions® Grocerant Guru®. 

Let’s face it consumer no longer want to cook from scratch, let alone spend the time walking around a grocery stores with 60,000 items that they will never buy.  In a new report released by Acosta edified restaurant customer discontinuity growing as restaurant customers increasingly relying on someone else to handle the kitchen work, even if the meal is enjoyed at home.

Acosta’s  high-level look at today’s consumption patterns finds consumers turning to such new food channels as third-party delivery services, subscription meal kits and so-called frictionless takeout programs. Our Grocerant Guru® began speaking about this in 1997, and we can’t help but wonder why restaurant chains are so reluctant to evolve? 

Today Supermarkets and convenience stores  have evolved to the point that consumers say their Ready-2-Eat and Heat-n-Eat fresh prepared food is equal to or better than restaurant quality according to Foodservice Solutions® latest study.  In fact the Acosta study found that they garnered 16 % of consumers in any three-month stretch.  That’s 16% not going to restaurants for Ready-2-Eat or simply prepared food. 

It does not get better for the restaurant sector the study found that 57 percent of consumers had eaten a prepared supermarket meal at home during the three months preceding the survey, while only 42 percent had ordered delivery from a restaurant. Sales of the supermarket meals have doubled since 2006, to $27.5 billion, according to the study.

Meal kits companies are however pantry busters for the grocery sector.  Meal Kits are simply boxes of prepped and pre-measured ingredients that consumers receive through a shipping service to cook at home.  Five years ago they did not exist the study found 8 % of customers are buying the kits. With one in five consumers with children, or 20 percent, are opting for that source of meals.  

Millennials are drive change as they grew up with the internet and are constantly in search of discovery new ways to do the same things their parents did but they are trying to do it better and faster.  Seeking a frictionless food solution seems second nature to Millennials according to our Grocerant Guru®.   All the while restaurant chains C-level suites are filled with Boomer CEO’s trying do what they always have done. 

Helping foodservice operators evolve into a consumer Grocerant niche position is what Foodservice Solutions® does best.  Invite Foodservice Solutions® to complete a grocerant program assessment, grocerant scorecard, brand, or product placement assistance.  Since 1991 www.FoodserviceSolutions.us

of Tacoma, WA has been the global leader in the Grocerant niche. Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us