Eating-In while Dinning-Out Is an Insight we Can’t Forget

 

Do you remember the old adage; getting ‘butts in seats’ used to be the only worry for restaurant managers trying to drive top line sales and bottom-line profits at their restaurant. Steven Johnson the Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions® stated recently “The consumer is dynamic not static. If the consumer likes your restaurant, they will want to eat your meals at their house.  Restaurateurs must oblige.”

Here again, from time to time you need to step back take a look in order to see just where you are today and where you may want to go. In a previous report Technomic found: “The boom in takeout, delivery and catering hasn’t cut into on-premise restaurant dining, validating operators’ contentions the newfound business is largely incremental, according to a new study of dining-out patterns.  While Foodservice Solutions® team identified and quantified this back in 2014 and again in 2015 we love the validation.

Technomic found “Eating inside restaurants remains the top choice of restaurant patrons, with the portion of customers opting for dine-in service holding steady at 82% for the last three months”. Technomic noted “the gap between in-restaurant and off-premise consumption of meals prepared outside the home is closing. Seven of 10 customers bought takeout meals or snacks in the last three months, and two of three used a drive-thru, according to the report. Delivery was the least used off-premise option, but half of patrons used that channel in the most recently concluded quarter”

So why should you begin to focus on new non-traditional meals as incremental revenue because Millennials and Gen Xers are particularly avid buyers of food and beverages for off-premise consumption. The Technomic report found that 56% of the total restaurant dollars spent by those age groups went toward takeout or delivery.

Marianne Quinlan-Sacksteder, director of insights at Acosta’s Center of Shared Business Intelligence: “While our research found that dining in at restaurants has remained flat year-over-year, U.S. diners instead indicated spreading their dollars across a variety of out-of-home channels," .. "Diners reported out-of-home food spending has increased significantly over the past two years, with increasing levels of diners indicating they are leveraging foodservice solutions beyond dine-in establishments.”

Let’s fast forward to today and see what clues are relevant today. We just might be evolving. 

 

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

 

Well, what do you think?

Success does leave clues www.FoodserviceSolutions.us  is the global leader in grocerant niche business development.  We can help you identify, quantify and qualify additional food retail segment opportunities.  Has your company had a Grocerant ScoreCard completed, Grocerant Program Assessment, or new Grocerant niche product Ideation?  Want one?  Call 253-759-7869 Email: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us