Digital Meal Planning Saves Time and Money so What’s for Dinner Fast?

 

At the intersection of What’s for Dinner, and the family sitting down for dinner is a big gap of fresh better for you solutions.  One company that is helping consumers focus on one of the hallmarks of grocerant niche Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat fresh prepared food that has the halo of ‘better-4-you’ is eMeals according to Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions®.  Let’s look at some facts:

 

1.       Recent Grocerant ScoreCards found 81.1% 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 63.7% of consumers purchase prepared food items from a retail location at least three times a month.

3.       79.6% all dinners have at least 1 grocerant niche Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat meal component and 66.6% have two meal components.

4.       When asked if they wanted to cook dinner from scratch or assemble dinner from fresh meal components 91.3 % of Gen Z chose assemble from Fresh Prepared Meal Components and Millennials 83.4% 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 61.2% of shoppers, while 40.9% of shoppers said they buy prepared foods on impulse. Dinner has the highest amount of prepared food buys with 81.7% of respondents making purchases for that meal, while lunch comes in at 76.9% and breakfast at 61.4%.

7.       57.8% of consumers would like to add Alcohol to a dinner order

In case you did not know digital meal-planning service eMeals joined forces with Pack Health, a health coaching platform for chronic disease management, to offer health-focused meal plans. So, Pack Health members could have access through the eMeals app to weekly meal plans meeting their health needs, making healthy meal choices that address their chronic disease issues easier and more convenient.

Among the health-focused meal plans available through eMeals are Heart Healthy, Diabetic, Low Calorie, Low Carb, Quick and Healthy, Keto, and Paleo. Pack Health will work with members to figure out the best plan for their particular conditions and provide ongoing support to improve nutritional habits. The service is free for eligible Pack Health members.

Now, eMeals acquired RecipeBox, an app enabling consumers to save and organize online and offline recipes in a central location for easy access. eMeals will maintain RecipeBox as a separate brand with extensive enhancements designed to ramp up growth while using the app as a new promotional channel for retailers and food and beverage companies.

Three related services will now operate as part of the eMeals platform: eMeals, the subscription-based digital meal-planning service offering 15 food styles and seamless online shoppability; RecipeBox, a free app with more than 200,000 users, a 4.8 rating and a searchable database of more than 2 million user-imported recipes from across the web; and eMeals Grocery Connect, a software development kit allowing other apps and websites to add integrated online grocery shopping functionality.

So, the addition of RecipeBox to the eMeals portfolio will permit the company to grow its footprint, further its goal of helping home cooks get dinner prepared quickly and with greater variety, and offer new brand exposure opportunities for its CPG partners.

Forrest Collier, CEO of Birmingham, Ala.-based eMeals, stated, “Recipe collection on the web is fragmented, so consumers have no way to digitally store all the recipes they find in one place,” ... “RecipeBox solves that problem, allowing users to centrally save recipes from across the web along with their personal family recipes, those they’ve discovered in cookbooks and magazines, and the new meal inspiration they find within the huge RecipeBox database. It’s going to change the way people search, store and shop all of their favorite recipes.” 

Get this, among the first RecipeBox enhancements since the eMeals acquisition are the recent launch of an Android version and the new ability to order groceries for pickup or delivery directly through the app from companies such as Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, Albertsons and Instacart. Other planned RecipeBox upgrades include enhanced recipe discovery, browser extensions providing a new way to clip recipes from anywhere on the web, and an updated website offering synced access to users’ personal recipes boxes from both mobile and desktop devices.

Time starved consumers can now plan a meal on the go with the app, place an order with an app, stop by a store on the way home and pick-up the order.  So, stop wondering what’s for dinner? The ‘halo’ of fresh fast food can be yours with a simple view of your smart phone.

Don’t over reach. Are you ready for some fresh ideations? Do your food marketing ideations look more like yesterday than tomorrow? Interested in learning how Foodservice Solutions® 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 the following links: Facebook,  LinkedIn, or Twitter