Eating-Out While Eating-In
Are you cooking dinner from scratch
tonight? Odds are you are not. Cooking a family meal from scratch that
everyone will eat continues to be an obstacle for many households today according
to Foodservice Solutions® Grocerant Guru™. While 80% of meals are
prepared at home that does not mean they are cooked from scratch.
Lacking the skill-set required to cook
from scratch combined with ever increasing divergent family meal dynamic including,
multi-cultural households, multi-generational households scheduling time,
flavor preference, and calorie/carbohydrates limits, the effort to meet
everyone requirements is simply put “too much work according” to Foodservice
Solutions® Steven Johnson.
Today no one can argue about the
increased rate of consumer adaption of how the Grocerant Niche filled with
Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat fresh prepared food is changing the dynamics with
the retail food space. While the cooking from scratch is a lot of work
consumers like eating at home. However today dinner meals for the home and
or meal components for dinner at home are not all prepared at home or from
scratch. In fact King Retail Solutions found that “62 percent of consumers bought fresh prepared
meals from a non-restaurant”.
NPD 80% of meals prepared at home
Even Harry Balzer, NPD chief industry
analyst recently stated recently that “About 80% of meals were prepared at home
in November 2013, about the same as 2012, NPD data show. The percentage of
meals prepared at home has risen steadily from 77.4% in 2008 at the beginning
of the recession.
Hudson Riehle the National Restaurant
Associations SVP of Research & Knowledge Group stated a new study found
that “75 percent of consumer say going to a restaurant with family/ friends is
a better use of time than cooking and cleaning up. Combine that with his
comments on flavor when Riehle stated “ 7 in 10 consumers say their favorite
restaurant foods provide flavors which can’t be easily be duplicated at home.”
Here is what is clear time is pivotal
when considering preparing a meal at home.
Lingering Concerns 65 Inch HDTV
Syndrome
However Foodservice Solutions®
Grocerant Guru™ warns that “restaurants should not expect to see the same
customers returning to the restaurant space as those that flooded the doors pre
2008.” Restaurants need to understand the family dynamic has changed,
driven in large part by the lingering recession and technology.
Specifically, as Foodservice Solutions found the “65 Inch HDTV
Syndrome”.
The undercurrent of an evolving food
retail consumer is emerging. Consumer wants restaurant quality food, flavor,
meal components that can be mix and matched, then bundled into a cohesive
family meal and served / eaten at home. They are driven by growing numbers of
multi-generational, multi-ethnic, and recession weary families.
Restaurants find the Undercurrents
of Success
The opportunity for restaurants selling
meal components has a huge up-side. NPD’s Balzer cautioned when he noted that
“Many people experienced a drop in income during the recession, and people
lower their food costs by using restaurants less, because restaurant meals cost
three times more than meals made at home”. Today we see a continued drop
/ decline in customer counts for the restaurant sector overall that has
continues since 2008. While the rate of
decline has dropped, the decline persists.
Restaurant need to create, develop, and
sell more meal components To-Go. Today
with the expanding undercurrents of customer migration the restaurant sector
will have to leverage Foodservice Solutions® 5 P’s of Food Marketing if
they expect to compete successfully with Grocery store deli’s, Chain Drug
stores the ilk of Walgreens, Convenience stores the ilk of Sheetz, Wawa and
Rutter’s in the future.
Riehle also noted that in a recent
survey 92% of consumers like going to restaurants. It’s up to individual
restaurants, chain restaurants if they want to sell consumer Ready-2-Eat and
Heat-N-Eat fresh prepared meal components. Consumers like restaurants as much
as they like 65 inch HDTV’s and NCAA basketball tournaments, baseball, soccer,
and football. I think consumers deserve to Eat-In while Eating-Out.
Visit: www.FoodserviceSolutions.us if you are
interested in learning how Foodservice Solutions 5P’s of Food Marketing can
edify your retail food brand while creating a platform for consumer convenient
meal participation, differentiation and
individualization or you can learn more at Facebook.com/Steven
Johnson, Linkedin.com/in/grocerant or twitter.com/grocerant
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