home : hartbeat : 2006-04-26

04.26.2006

“HartBeat” is The Hartman Group's FREE online newsletter, providing insight, analysis, information and strategy to give business leaders the knowledge and vision to build sustainable brands.

READMORE...

For more Hartman Group articles on PACKAGE DESIGN, click here...

11.17.2005 "2 Consumer-Centric Principles of Design"

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

02.01.2006 "Brand New Inspiration from the Culture of Food"

04.14.2005 "Emerging Trends in Parenting the Healthy Eater: Our Evolving Food Culture"

03.24.2005 "Convenient...and Fresh?: Evolving Food Culture in America"

11.11.2004 "What's for Dinner?: Understanding Meal Fragmentation as a Cultural Phenomenon"

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" <

Archives »
Click here for an archive of past HartBeat articles

digg
del.icio.us

reddit
twitter

friendfeed

StumbleUpon

The Rise Of Single-serve Packaging

There was a time not long ago that "value" in packaged foods meant larger bags, larger containers, larger trays, larger bottles and the infamously larger cups found at McDonald's, Dunkin' Donuts and 7-Eleven. Bigger has always just seemed better in this land of rising opportunity.

Slowly, though, we've noticed that manufacturers, especially in highly perishable packaged foods, have caught on to the fact that consumers increasingly seem willing to spend more per volume in order to get multi-packs of single-serve sizes. And they may even avoid existing multi-serving packages that generally offer an even lower price per unit volume.

What seems irrationally wasteful from a purely price per unit volume analysis has become an intermediary, optimal "value" option to consumers from a broad array of backgrounds. The added value in single-serve multipacks is grounded in the user experience of these products: when, where and how they are eaten.

The biggest thing we're noticing in America's pantries is that there doesn't seem to be a target demographic for single-serve packaging. Everyone is using them to some degree. Empty nesters. Single adults. Even families, the supposed raison d'etre for large sized multi-serve package designs.

What is driving the upswell of interest in single-serve packaging?

Primary Cultural Drivers: Fragmentation, Restaurantization and Portability of Everyday Eating Behaviors

Fragmentation of eating behaviors is something we've written about recently and continue to hammer home, because of its very concrete impact on packaged food innovation. Increasingly, we as Americans eat alone in our daily lives. By this we don't mean that we eat furtively in closets so much as that we simply find it too difficult to arrange schedules to eat with others and to align divergent food preferences of those with whom we dine much of the time. Ultimately, it's becoming much harder to share the same food in our culture. And food sharing is one of the basic premises (other than solitary over-consumption) behind multi-serve package design and delivery.
Restaurantization of our eating behaviors refers to the metaphorical and literal impact of increased restaurant use within all demographics and lifestages. The restaurant culture that has overtaken America since the 1980s is one in which the restaurant is now relevant on almost any day of the week. This influence has altered our tolerance level when it comes to the routinization of meals and eating experiences. Consumers increasingly find themselves "shaking things" up at home to the point that they often have no way to tell an interviewer what their "typical" range of meals really is in a given week. Because they find that there really is no typical week in their lives.
Our schedules do not permit a fixed rotation of meals for dinner, because a collective shared dinner may or may not happen on any given night. In addition, the plethora of restaurant influences goads us to constantly seek new eating experiences and to never settle for "Pasta Tuesday" and "Meatloaf Friday" as we used to. We seek variety at the daily level like never before. We have begun to live most eating occasions as if a menu stood before us. As a broad consumer culture, therefore, it becomes very hard to predict, at the household level, how much of a given packaged food will actually be consumed in the week right after purchase or right after the product first gets opened. As we are becoming aware of all this unpredictability, multi-serve packaging becomes not a source of perceived "value" but a frustrating source of waste in our lives, especially in the category of perishable packaged foods.
Portability of everyday eating is a feature of the eating experience we increasingly have come to rely on. It's not that we are eating more literally as we move but that we need to be able to carry small, individually portioned eating experiences with us to consume in out-of-home contexts whose timing is often less than certain. One of the reasons that QSR and fast food continue to do so well is that packaged foods offer so few good solutions for on-the-go eating. And when they do offer solutions, they are inevitably oriented to single-serve packaging and delivery.

Single Serve is Here to Stay

Certain categories of multi-serve packaged food seem to have some staying power with 3+ person households, primarily because certain brands have enough habitual brand loyalty and appeal within homes that they empower food sharing and result in very rapid consumption rates at the weekly level. Multi-serve packaging makes eminent sense to these consumers, because there is very little time for these foods to go stale once the big bag gets opened. Potato chips are a good example in larger households.

But as America's households increasingly involve 3 or fewer people, the scope for multi-serve packaging itself starts to look quite bleak. And because the variety of packaged foods has increased, thanks mostly to the rapid influx of specialty foods in recent years, there is so much variety at home these days in packaged "staple" goods that we often rotate frequently between products at the weekly level. This makes it even harder to predict when that large bag of chips or that liter of soymilk will really get finished before they go bad.

Single serve packaging is fulfilling an unmet need to manage waste and to acknowledge our increasingly individualistic eating patterns in a highly fragmented, fickle culture of eaters who think that every day is a good day to try something new in the world of food.

Implications

Get more aggressive in marketing single-serve packaging formats. You'd be surprised where pent up need exists right now that drives multi-serve sales mostly out of a lack of choices.
Single serve makes your product highly portable as long as its user experience doesn't create new problems to manage. The key here is thoughtful user-centered design of the opening experience, the carrying experience and the storage experience, among other things.
Single-serve packaging mitigates regret of spoiled food at the point of sale, enhancing a primary shopper's overall sense of well-being. There is no more un-discussed regret in America than the amount of food we all throw away each week because it goes rotten or stale in our refrigerators and cupboards.
We believe that, marketed and designed well, single-serve multipacks can easily over take multi-serve packaging in most categories where the latter still exists. Consumers will pay more for the cascading series of benefits that result if cleverly brought to their awareness.

Comment »