Restaurant Discontinuity Driven by Grocerant Growth

 

Once again, Foodservice Solutions® Grocerant Guru® Steven Johnson predicts that 2022 will be a record year of chain restaurant discontinuity.  Specifically, with more chain restaurant closing stores and fewer total chain restaurants open entering 2023.

Regular readers of this blog know that back in the day (2005) the team at Foodservice Solutions® released a White Paper Restaurant Consumer Discontinuity; we noted consumer migration from the restaurant sector.  Consumers moved as their preference for meals eaten in restaurants waned and they migrated too fresh prepared meals bought and eaten at home.  The undercurrents of consumer migration from Eating-Out to Eating-In (at home) is even strong today according to Johnson.   

The main driver of this change is consumers desire to Mix and Match meal components into a perfect family meal.  This has been going on for a long time now.  In fact, consumers purchased 8 billion fast food combo meals in the year ended January 2012, down more than 12 percent from the 9 billion sold in the same period five years earlier, and that trend is continuing.  Consumers are dynamic not static.  Digital ordering and delivery has grown 300% faster than dine-in traffic since 2014.  

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Let’s see just what other preferences they have adopted:

1.       Recent Grocerant ScoreCards found 82.3% of consumers don’t know what’s for dinner at Noon, and 61.1 don’t know what’ s for dinner at 4PM %.

2.       Roughly 66% of consumers purchase prepared food items from a retail location at least three times a month.

3.       83.1% all dinners have at least 1 grocerant niche Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat meal component and 68.4% have two meal components.

4.       When asked if they wanted to cook dinner from scratch or assemble dinner from fresh meal components 90.4 % of Gen Z chose assemble from Fresh Prepared Meal Components and Millennials 82.7% chose meal components.

5.       Seventy-three percent of retail prepared food purchases are taken to go

6.       Prepared food purchases are frequently a planned purchase among 59% of shoppers, while 41% of shoppers said they buy prepared foods on impulse. Dinner has the highest amount of prepared food buys with 79% of respondents making purchases for that meal, while lunch comes in at 77% and breakfast at 62%.

7.       55% of consumers would like to try autonomous EV delivery

 

Regular readers of this blog know we regularly documented that, consumers like to mix and match meal components. Mix and match meal bundling is a benchmark for success within the grocerant niche.

Recently we documented how grocery stores are now doing a great job at offering ‘better-for-you’ side dishes empowering consumers to buy fresh prepared sides from the ‘service deli’ rather than at a restaurant.  The intended consequence consumers are buying more entrees as well.  Consumers are dynamic not static is your branded food solutions static or dynamic?

Meal time is now becoming a time of convenient meal participation, with differentiation and individualization for the entire family.  The ability of the retailer to empower consumer choice within a bundled offering creates an additional platform for success. Do you want to understand how to empower that choice? Are you willing to empower customer migration back you your brand?

Foodservice Solutions® specializes in outsourced business development. We can help you identify, quantify and qualify additional food retail segment opportunities.  Foodservice Solutions® of Tacoma WA is the global leader in the Grocerant niche visit Facebook.com/Steven Johnson, Linkedin.com/in/grocerant or twitter.com/grocerant