There is perhaps nothing that unites us more as a society than the late afternoon query, “What’s for dinner tonight?” as David Donnan, AT Kearney pointed out during Monday’s panel “What’s for Dinner? Fighting for the 6 P.M. Mindshare.” The answer all too often is “I don’t know, what do you want?” For consumers, especially those who don’t want or have time to cook, the solutions have become simpler, more varied, and faster than ever. For specialty food purveyors, it has become a battle to capture this growing market that wants dinner now and is not necessarily willing to go shop for it.
“Seventy percent of consumers want to eat at home,” said Donnan, “but only 10 percent want to cook. In addition, we’ve evolved from the standard household of mom, dad, and their 2.2 children to a nation where 62 percent of households are comprised of singles or childless couples. This new dynamic can be defined as eating out while staying home.”
Donnan was joined on stage by a panel including Bowie Cheung, director of operations for Uber Eats, Matt Fitzgerald, vice-president of brands for HelloFresh, and Evelyn Miliate, corporate chef for Raley’s. Each discussed how they’re catering to changing consumers preferences and the desires of disparate food tribes.
“We have different types of customers,” said Miliate, “from those who want to cook to those who don’t but want fresh, hot meals. There are also those who want to cook but don’t necessarily want to shop the whole store. We do best with more traditional meals that start, for example, with a steak and add vegetables and starches. We have heat-and-eat meals options but also try to allow consumers to customize their meals.”
Raley’s offers Meal Kits that come with all of the ingredients needed to make a meal; Quick Kits, which include precut vegetables and cooked chicken to get dinner on the table in a hurry; Steamable Rotisserie Sides which pair with grab-and-go Rotisserie Chicken, and Creative Kits which include several combinations of sauces, starches, and vegetables.
It is able to adjust recipes to cater to dietary lifestyles but doesn’t necessarily advertise it on packaging. While its steak meal kit with mashed cauliflower is keto-friendly, for instance, it doesn’t indicate that on its packaging for fear it alienate those who don’t subscribe to that lifestyle, Miliate said.
HelloFresh, which as of last year, had delivered close to 47 million meals to 1.8 million households and in addition to its main brand launched EveryPlate, a more affordable meal kit solution, has experienced “incredibly strong” demand for keto foods, which Fitzgerald said spiked in popularity during the first ten days of the new year as American’s adopted New Year’s resolution.
“There is a lot more development work required for vegan, Paleo, and keto meals, but there is much more consumer stickiness in those channels,” said Fitzgerald. “They are a passionate group.”
UberEats, meanwhile, started as a lunchtime delivery system three years ago and currently serves 350 markets in 36 countries.
While it provides filters that allow consumers to narrow selections by dietary preference in some areas, doing so across the board would be a challenge, since the company would need to scrub recipe data related to all the dishes, said Cheung, “So much of our experience is predicated on the quality of our data so we’d need to make sure that it’s accurate.”
We’re empowering restaurants with the technology to increase their business. Allowing them to sell their food outside the restaurant in ways they never would have been able to do themselves. We’ve tried to make the system more efficient for consumers, restaurants, and the delivery people themselves, with different apps for each one. Our mission is to make eating well effortless, every day, for everyone.”
-- James Mellgren
from Industry Operations http://bit.ly/2ChJep6
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