10.20.2005

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For more Hartman Group articles on FOOD CULTURE, click here...

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09.23.2004 "Asian Dinner Mixes & the Family Meal: Evolving Food Culture"

08.05.2004 "Snacking Our Way Through the Day: Food Culture in America"

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The Uncertain Future Of Meal Preparation Retail

Seattle continues to be the epicenter of many trends in grocery retailing and broader food culture. Mostly, though, these are foodie trends oriented to upscale and gourmet tastes. The latest event on the food scene here, and elsewhere, is a new concept in food retailing that orients to the vague term "convenience" by outsourcing the before dinner part of dinner: meal planning and cooking preparation (marinating, slicing, dicing, assembling ingredients in the right proportions, etc.).

Several of these new retail brands have appeared (e.g., Dream Dinners) in which consumers pay a set fee to be allowed access to a kitchen prep room filled with the raw ingredients used to compose a fixed monthly roster of dinner dishes in 4-6 serving sizes. These retail operations have outsourced all elements of dinner except the act of cooking itself. Each consumer leaves the outlet with several ready-to-cook meals. All the measuring, cutting, dicing and marinating has been done for them. All they do is assemble the meals on site and customize the ingredients of the basic recipes to suit their needs. Often, the meals get frozen right away and thawed out much like frozen meals for which they serve as more fresh seeming replacements.

If restaurant takeout and prepared foods are ready-to-eat and frozen entrees/left-overs are ready-to-heat, meals from meal prep outlets are something in between: ready-to-cook.

In the lives of consumers, ready-to-cook meals appear to have a lot of potential relevance. They can:

Act as substitutes for cooking from scratch, which some consumers perceive as more time-consuming and laborious (in terms of planning the recipe, obtaining the ingredients and pulling it off)
Prevent consumers from scrambling after work for dinner ideas or from running to the grocery store for ingredients (especially in suburban and ex-urban areas where stores require 15 minutes of driving or more)
Be a way for less confident or creative consumers to try something beyond their usual roster of stand-by meals
Allow consumers with minimal wellness standards to feel satisfied that they have a better convenient dinner option than packaged dinners, frozen entrees or delivery pizza

Limited added value of meal prep in the contemporary culture

The added value offered up by meal preparation retail is about more than mere convenience or cost savings - though even its users will tout both benefits in interviews. Ready-to-cook fresh meals add value to consumers' lives by responding to several cultural trends within the food culture of ordinary American homes:

Lack of perceived time to cook fresh, healthy dinners from scratch at home
Lack of confidence or willingness to cook

The problem meal prep retail faces is that there are too many other, much easier, ways to respond to both these trend forces without sacrificing the feeling of eating fresh, or even healthy, food. Ethnic restaurant takeout as well as prepared foods at grocery stores are much more popular and trendy ways to meet these needs. They also offer consumers a broader range of choices than most meal prep retail outlets with their fixed monthly menus.

We would note that busy families, especially, are most willing to sacrifice the adventure of these convenience dining options for financial reasons. They are a key target market for meal prep, especially families not accustomed constantly to eating something new.

Our Take on Meal Prep

Meal prep retail does not serve the future of the marketplace, because its innovation is backward-looking and actually runs counter to dominant trends in domestic food culture nationwide.

Fragmenting taste preferences within homes have caused the phenomenon of "multiple" dinners in many families; preparing meals in 4-6 serving sizes simply doesn't address this reality.
Meal prep facilities assume that there is a latent desire to return to a more traditional family meal where "everyone" gets fed the same thing. In reality, we find that most consumers who voice this desire exhibit strong behavioral orientations in the opposite direction and actually prefer to honor the individualized taste preferences of each individual. For Moms, this is the new standard of 'nurturing', one their own Moms often find baffling. Additionally, meal prep retail works against the trend toward outsourcing cooking altogether at the last minute, something which allows consumers the greatest ability to customize what's for dinner, as opposed to selecting from one of five pre-prepared options in the freezer.
Currently, meal prep retail is being marketed too exclusively on the convenience-oriented message in terms of merely outsourcing cooking prep tasks.
In reality, on most convenience dinner occasions, these meals don't really offer much practical time savings and will get ignored as much as meals prepared "from scratch." Increasingly, consumers who prefer to outsource the entire cooking process on convenience occasions generally live close to many options that allow them to do so already (e.g., fast casual, curbside pick-up at branded restaurants, ethnic takeout, prepared foods at grocery stores, pre-cut vegetables at grocery stores, etc.) Additionally, the food industry has already helped consumers outsource meal prep tasks, such as cutting and dicing, in innovations such as frozen pre-cut vegetables, allowing quick cooking at home.
Meal prep retail does not offer much culinary diversity on its menu and comes off as rather bland.
It won't attract most urban and suburban residents who associate purchasing food with purchasing "a taste experience I don't ordinarily get."

While it sounds like a nice idea, we find that meal prep retail, as it now operates, will secure itself primarily among consumers living in sparse suburban and ex-urban environments who also, for a variety of reasons, find it distasteful, or financially wasteful, to outsource all their cooking in the form of restaurant takeout, prepared foods, delivered food, etc. They are trying to return to an imagined past of quaint, frugal, at-home dinners, that increasingly few others are demonstrably interested in.

Possible Improvements

Offer a larger monthly menu, with multiple ethnic cuisines to compete with ethnic takeout
Offer plans that allow for purchasing 1-2 serving size meals to broaden the appeal of the concept to an increasing number of households with fragmented taste preferences that make a "shared" dinner impossible on many occasions.
Align with cooking classes and chefs to bolster the brand's authenticity as a purveyor of fresh and tasty food.

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