Today’s consumers are as time starved as ever and when you
couple that with a growing lack of cooking from scratch skill-set grocerant niche
Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat fresh food continues to garner customers attention and
drive food channel migration according to Steven Johnson Grocerant Guru®
at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice
Solutions®. Consumers continue seeking
increasingly convenient home cooked meal replacement options, restaurants meals,
meal components are finding their place in grocery stores frozen food court and
fresh prepared meal stations within stores.
Our friends at PYMNTS had
a recent interview with, Atul Sood, chief business officer
at Kitchen United, the ghost kitchen and virtual food hall company behind
grocery giant Kroger’s
in-store multi-brand pickup and delivery
restaurants, spoke to the consumer demand for more hot food options at the
supermarket. The team at Foodservice Solutions® wants me to share it. We think it is well worth your time.
“What we had as an initial hypothesis was that when consumers do
shopping for the week, they don’t necessarily want to cook that night,” Sood
explained. “That seems to be really clicking with consumers. As soon as they
get educated about the option of ordering from restaurants in a grocery store,
that repeat orders tend to be very high and consumer retention tends to be very
strong.”
He noted that while prepared meals have been an option at the
grocery store for decades, name-brand restaurant options are a newer
innovation, posing a major opportunity for grocers to capture some of the
consumers’ dining spending and an opportunity for those restaurant brands to
reach additional customers.
In fact, buying prepared meals at the grocery store is on the
rise. For instance, research from PYMNTS’ study “Digital Economy Payments:
Consumers Buy Into Food Bargains,” which drew from a July
survey of a census-balanced panel of nearly 2,700 U.S. consumers, found that
37% of consumers had bought prepared food on their most recent grocery trip, up
7 points from the 30% of consumers who had done so back in November 2021.
“Consumers are taking to it very quickly,” Sood said. “As soon
as they realize it’s an option for them, to use a pun, they really just eat it
up.”
He added that once consumers try the brand’s in-Kroger virtual
food halls, they return once a week or more.
Overall, online ordering may continue to lag well behind more
traditional channels in terms of the total share of diners’ restaurant
spending. However still, the majority of consumers engage with restaurants via
digital channels at least some of the time, according to PYMNTS data.
Specifically, just 16% of consumers primarily order food via
restaurants’ direct digital ordering channels such as their website or their
app, according to data from PYMNTS’ study “The 2022 Restaurant
Digital Divide: Restaurant Apps And Websites In The Spotlight,”
which draws from a survey of nearly 2,000 U.S. consumers. Moreover, only half
of that share (8%) stated that they mainly order food via third-party
aggregators.
Yet, more than half of consumers have adopted digital channels.
Research from PYMNTS’ recent study “12 Months Of The
ConnectedEconomy™: 33,000 Consumers On Digital’s Role In Their Everyday Lives,”
which draws from responses from tens of thousands of U.S. consumers, notes that
57% of consumers place orders from restaurants’ websites and/or apps each
month, as of November. Plus, 42% order from aggregators.
Sood noted that while millennials and Gen Z consumers have been
the quickest to adopt digital channels, the company has seen engagement across
older generations as well.
“What the pandemic did was expose the different generations of
consumers to the capabilities for delivery, and we’ve seen those continue to
rise,” Sood said.
From a technological perspective, one of the challenges is
enabling the multi-brand ordering that Kitchen United powers at these
locations, so consumers can purchase from different restaurants in one order
with one payment. However, Sood noted that these capabilities are key to
meeting families’ demands, with parents ordering each from a different brand
and kids choosing a more child-friendly option.
Looking ahead over the next several years, he expects the
technology to become more common across the country, given that it is already
proving popular.
“The economics are there or the consumers, the use case has been
proven for the grocers, and I think this will be something you see more and
more in the grocery industry,” Sood predicted.
Are you ready for
some fresh ideations? Do your food marketing ideas look more like yesterday
than tomorrow? Interested in learning how our Grocerant Guru® can edify your retail food brand while
creating a platform for consumer convenient meal participation, differentiation
and individualization? Email us
at: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us or visit: us on our social media sites by clicking one of
the following links: Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment