Trends

Food Industry statistics are unanimous:
“Consumers' number one priority is convenience”

For years price was the top concern, but today’s consumers no longer have time to cook from scratch. Not only that, but cooking skills are declining. People are not clear on cooking steps. (Many new food products fail within two years, especially mass-produced frozen microwave products, because they never get cooked right.)
Like so many other chores in their lives, consumers increasingly delegate the tasks of:
— menu creation
— shopping list formulation
— meal preparation

As a result, convenience and quality now drive the fastest growing food market product segments. Quality, nutrition, convenience and ease of preparation are driving the retail food business like never before. According to information provided to the National Frozen Food Association, the dollar volume of off premise feeding now surpasses that of supermarkets.

Here are just a few food industry facts to consider.

• On average the current trend of eating out or buying prepared food is 2 meals out of three per day.

• 75%of consumers do not know by 4 P.M. what they are eating that evening.

• 94% of supermarkets offer ready to cook entrees, 65% sell packaged ready-to-eat products, 34% offer side dishes and 17% make cooked-to order meals.

•  Significant display areas of the fresh meat case in most supermarkets are now devoted to value added pre-cooked and pre-seasoned and packaged for cooking convenience meat products--a sector that has had annual growth exceeding 14% annually for the last five years.

•  Just to slot (pay the annual rent on the shelf space) for each food product newly introduced nationally costs about $450 thousand dollars.

•  The average cost, from concept to rollout, to introduce a food product is $20 million.

•  Many new food products fail within two years, especially microwave products, because they never get cooked right.

•  44 million Americans can't read the directions for your microwave oven, or on any food package (1992 National Adult Literacy Survey); the other 150 million of us put the microwave on high and use our fingers as temperature probes.

•  Its commonly recognized within the food industry that if products come out of the supermarket freezer or refrigerator case, they usually go into the microwave oven- whether they ought to or not.