Meals vs Meal Kits

The battle lines are beginning to clear and a picture of customer migration from cook from scratch at home to meals to food away from home and food for home prepared away yes grocerant niche Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat fresh prepared food including meals and meal components according to Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions® Grocerant Guru® Steven Johnson.

According to the USDA food sales for home and sales for food away from home through March 2017 Sales for food at home were $194.4 Billion and sales for food away from home were$197.7.  The fast is consumers like to buy meals, meal kits, and meal components away from home and simply assemble meals rather than cook them from scratch according to Johnson.

Meal kits have broken out providing Millennials a platform to learn how to cook or as our Grocerant Guru® says ‘Meal Kits are training wheels for Millennials. In fact 19 million shoppers in the U.S. will have taken digitally ordered meal kits for a test drive by 2021, according to recent findings by Morningstar.

The Morning star study estimates that 11 million customers will make ordering prepped meals online a habit via household names such as Blue Apron, Hello Fresh and Plated.

Restaurants have a bit of a conundrum on their hand as consumers have traditionally been migrating from grocery stores to restaurants now Millennials is search of discovery are abandoning both traditional avenue of fresh food distribution grocery stores and restaurants for new platforms that sell grocerant niche Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat fresh prepared food.

In May, select Whole Foods stores on the West Coast teamed with Salted, a meal kit provider, to bring the brand’s $12 meal kit options to their customers undercutting both meal kit companies and the price for a restaurant meal for two persons.

The retail foodservice price, value, service equilibrium continues evolve.  The trend in all avenues of fresh food distribution is lower prices, new or different service, and elevated product flavor offerings. Which all contribute to business model disruption.

Convenience is the one undercurrent of change that has universal appeal to all food customers. Success does leave clues and if you want to drive top line growth and bottom line profits within the foodservice sector today to you need to expand your branded offerings of meals, meal components in new non-traditional locations.

Invite Foodservice Solutions® to complete a Grocerant Program Assessment, Grocerant ScoreCard, or for product positioning or placement assistance, or call our Grocerant Guru®.  Since 1991 www.FoodserviceSolutions.us  of Tacoma, WA has been the global leader in the Grocerant niche. Contact: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us or 253-759-7869