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10.01.2008

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Reimagining Convenience Foods

The Opportunity for CPG and Food Retailers to Make Quality, Distinctive Flavors More Accessible at Home

“Fresh produce for retail consumption is a thing of the past.”

— E. W. Williams, Quick Frozen Foods, 1954.

— L. Chapman, Good Housekeeping, 1950

From WW II on, convenience foods have transformed the way entire generations of American consumers have cooked and savored food. Even today, the role of convenience foods in the kitchens and diets of Americans owes a great deal to some 50 odd years of food history. After a half century of innovation, from TV dinners to string cheese, what hasn’t been done that marketers and packaged food innovators can set their sights on?

A recent examination of larger cultural trends in what we call the Culture of Food reveals that consumer notions of convenience are much broader and more trend-oriented than the current industry focus on the “quick” and “complete solution.” While we don’t deny that Americans love a quick meal on the go, we don’t see how this is anything but an accepted cultural convention marketers should intuitively understand. It is hardly a trend. And, though Americans love to take the night off from cooking, pile in the car and head to their favorite restaurant (even mid-week), we have never found much evidence that Americans need any more “home meal replacement” solutions than they already have in the form of: restaurants, takeout or frozen entrees and/or prepared foods.

We have discovered a more recent development in American food culture that we have yet to see most major CPG companies grasp or set their innovation teams on in a serious way. If convenience is either about speed or ease of preparation, we’d like to propose that the latter is a source of constant potential opportunities, if just slightly reimagined.

Why?

Because what America seeks to prepare easily at home is changing in an era of ever globalizing food culture. America’s eating habits are changing faster than they ever have before due to the explosion of culinary diversity in the restaurant scene. While Americans have gone to restaurants heavily since the 1980s, only in the last 10 years have they had access to the kind of culinary diversity we see today in most major markets. And whole generations, Gen X and Y, have now grown up thinking that frequent restaurant going is simply a normal part of life. These younger cohorts also have become delinked from any notions of “my traditional cuisine,” preferring to sample any cuisine from around the world that strikes their fancy.

It used to be enough for packaged food makers to box up or jar up established flavors and food experiences under the rubric of convenience. This is how the convenience industry began in the 1940s and 1950s. But now, the key challenge is to understand the curious connection between trends in the restaurant scene and the American home-cooked meal.

This complementary report unpacks this critical zone of cultural change with both quantitative and ethnographic insights.

ORDER CONVENIENCE FOODS WHITE PAPER NOW >>

Comment »

Thoroughly Modern Eating:
The TV Dinner

Although complete frozen meals were already feeding airplane passengers in 1945, consumers would not see them in stores until much later. C.A. Swanson and Sons, Inc. is generally credited with popularizing the format and was the first to use the term "TV dinner" to market their frozen meals in the early 50s. Interestingly, frozen meals arrived on the scene before many households had freezers to hold them, which meant that the dinners had to be purchased and eaten on the same day.

SOURCE:

Reimagining Convenience Foods: The Opportunity for CPG and Food Retailers to Make Quality, Distinctive Flavors More Accessible at Home. Prepared by Tinderbox a part of The Hartman Group, Inc., 2008.