2018

Blaine Becker is Senior Director of Marketing at The Hartman Group, a leading Consumer Analytics firm focused on the Food & Beverage market that was founded more than 25 years ago. The Hartman Group provides advisory services to companies and elaborates periodical in-sight studies on consumers trends and behavior, among other topics.
 
As The Hartman Group’s 2013 Modern Eating report first highlighted, traditional eating patterns built around three “square,” structured meals a day has given way to modern eating styles characterized by frequent snacking that often occurs unsystematically and varies from person to person.
 
Snacking is now so entwined in our food and beverage culture that it makes up fully half of all eating occasions, and 47 percent of U.S. consumers say that most days they can’t get through the day without a snack.
 
What’s happening to America’s traditional eating behaviors and patterns? We now eat and drink what we want, when we want and anywhere we want. Sometimes planned, more often on a whim. An energy bar or fruit smoothie may replace breakfast one day or serve as lunch the next day. Perhaps a bowl of cereal before bedtime. Nothing seems to be as it once was. We long for the good old days when meal planning and eating was all so routine and predictable.
 
As haphazard as that behavior seems, the patterns are not random. Eating is tied viscerally to the changing rhythms of people’s daily lives, including their perception that they are overbooked and their need to feel healthy and satisfied by food at the same time they take care of their families’ disparate eating needs.
 
The challenge for food and beverage companies is to understand these new and changing rhythms continues today as we welcome food culture’s new era of retail disruption and diversification that snacking has unleashed.
 
“How we go about planning, acquiring and consuming food has been disrupted, and the result of that disruption has been in many cases the displacement of meals and a lot of variation in when and how and what gets consumed. An elevated focus on food and beverage for nutrition and a growing interest in global flavors have fueled an evolution in snacking behaviors and preferences,” said Tamara Barnett, Vice President of Strategic Insights at The Hartman Group.
 
The Hartman Group’s research finds that modern food and beverage culture is marked by fragmentation and an upending of tradition. While culturally we idealize three balanced meals a day, we rarely eat that way. Today, meal planning, shopping and cooking is decentralized, and there are fewer rules about what to eat and drink. In fact, we are much more comfortable with eating on the fly. Eating and drinking can happen anywhere and everywhere and at any time. No eating or drinking occasion typifies the fragmented, decentralized and no-rules modern food and beverage culture more than snacking.
 
Evidence of this shift in behavior can be seen in the emergence of restaurants as a source for snacks. The Hartman Group’s Future of Snacking 2016 report finds that, despite being the source for 81 percent of snack occasions, traditional food retailers are losing share to a divergent array of alternative retail sources — notably restaurants. Restaurants have become increasingly savvy about emerging consumer needs for smaller menu items within the now-blurry space between meals and snacks. 
 
“Snacking was about diversion and fun before,” Barnett points out, highlighting a shift toward health and wellness, fresh and premium. “The food industry has responded to this desire for fresh and minimally processed food and beverages, and there has been a proliferation of small, premium-quality brands that are now competing with those larger legacy brands.”
 
Snacking is no longer about a specific product category but rather about a set of behaviors — -a way of eating and drinking —a kind of occasion. In other words, anything and everything can be a snack —-and increasingly is.
 
It’s little wonder then why forward-thinking food manufacturers, retailers and food service operators are in a race to reformulate, repackage, reportion and revamp products and menus to better fit with these changing eating and drinking habits.
 
The Hartman Group’s Culture of Food 2015: New Appetites, New Routines report details the shifts that lead to snacking, describing how consumers eat around their schedules rather than scheduling around mealtimes. Dinner has become a mere pause between other activities. Lunch is often scheduled out to accommodate an overflow of meetings and must-do’s. And breakfast can be multitasked between commuting and working. This is our modern time deficient, which is heavily influencing an ad hoc shift in eating styles.
 
The ad hoc approach to mealtimes is increasingly part of new eating routines. While dinner remains an important social meal occasion, breakfast and lunch occasions are routinely “snackified,” especially during the workweek. This opens up schedules and frees up time from planning, cooking and cleaning.
 
On these no-cook, snackified occasions, consumers are eating a mix of packaged and prepared foods (yogurt cup, deli sushi/sandwiches) with some fresh ingredients (snacking fruit, salad bar). Or they may outsource these low-stakes occasions to food service. Reflecting these changes in eating habits, dining out is not just for special occasions but an everyday approach to “getting food.”
 
While a good deal of the shifts in food and beverage culture have been towards fresher and less processed foods, the fact is that we are giving up meal occasions with others or combining eating with other tasks as the need for productivity compels us to move forward. Many consumers also believe that hectic American lifestyles lead to poor eating habits.
 
Beyond the increased frequency with which we snack, snacks themselves have evolved far beyond conventional categories to include fresh items and higher-quality products and involve both food and beverage items.
 
Trend Toward Healthier
 
Snacking is becoming healthier, and healthy snacking is as much about ways of eating as it is about product attributes, with beliefs that eating small amounts of food every few hours is healthier than eating three big meals a day, that distributing small treat moments helps to avoid overindulgent binges and that overall balance can be achieved by rotating indulgent and non-indulgent.
 
Shopping for Snacks
 
With so many channels and stores available to consumers, shoppers keep a working geography of stores and restaurants that reflect certain patterns in snack purchasing and consumption behavior. These behaviors include: 

What do consumers take into consideration when shopping for snacks?
 
Barnett says that, as the Future of Snacking 2016 report finds, while the phenomenon of snacking is messy and at times hard to fully describe, coherence is brought to snacking by examining how three key drivers — Nourishment, Optimization and Pleasure—represent a thematic shift in food values and are connected to the needs driving snacking occasions.
 
“Snacks should be developed to deliver on the increasing need for nourishment, optimization or pleasure on the go. Consider not only how package design can simplify on-the-go user experiences but even how the product itself can really enable a mobile lifestyle.”
 
The future of snacking, Barnett said, will fully embrace freshness. Retailers and manufacturers alike should consider offering a product mix that reflects the desire for fresh but also recognizes the role of iconic and more processed favorites. “Think about fresh expectations that consumers now have when it comes to snacks. Does your product formulation as well as all aspects of the product signal contemporary notions of freshness and quality, or does it need to be revamped?”

The Hartman Group
The Hartman Group is at the leading-edge of demand-side food and beverage strategy. Our anthropologists, social scientists and business analysts have been immersed in a 25-year-long study of American food and beverage culture using ethnographic observation, quantitative tracking surveys and deep study of food and beverage trends. What we have learned and continue to uncover allows us to upend many notions of our traditional American eating and drinking patterns, thereby identifying unique opportunities and winning strategies for our clients.

Livio Martucci is Global Analytics and Shopper Director at IRI International where he helps leading retailers and food manufacturers to understand their consumers and growth opportunities through the application of data intelligence.

In recent years there has been an overall growth in demand for “healthy” food and drink products.  In some cases, items that a consumer perceives as healthy might be at odds with the reality, but what we can say for sure is that there is certainly an interest in trying to eat better. A recent survey by IRI International, revealed that two-thirds (70%) of people across Europe are buying healthy food -  with less salt, sugar, fat or calories.  This is an increase of 41% in just three years.

One of the reasons for this is simply more awareness about the role that food plays in health and wellness.  This is thanks to the media in general and social media in particular, which can ignite interest in food fads very rapidly, for example avocado and coconut oil which have become very popular due to promotion by celebrities in social media.  In recently times there have also been some high-profile incidents that raise questions about the safety of the food chain, and so more people are also paying attention to the quality of the food that they eat.  

In this article we will look in more detail at the findings of the IRI research, which was conducted among shoppers in seven European countries (Italy, Greece, Spain, Germany, France, the UK and Holland) about their attitudes and purchase behaviour around wellness foods. 

Motivations for Healthier Eating

In addition to general healthy food, the categories that were looked included free-from, organic and vegetarian foods.  The penetration levels of each category are already significant with organic food bought by 53% and vegetarian food bought by 39% of Europeans. 

Whilst choosing these first three types of wellness food are down purely to personal choice, intolerance or free-from foods were originally developed to fulfill dietary need.  A category which barely even existed just a few years ago, those foods that are free from things like lactose, gluten and yeast are now purchased by 33% of households across Europe. This figure is well in excess of estimates for people who suffer from food intolerance so it’s clear that this category is driven by choice as well as need.

The research revealed that half of Europeans are actively seeking some wellness benefits from the food that they purchase while 15% have health problems related to nutrition.  Other reasons to buy wellness foods included seeking something that is additive free (34%) and to protect the environment (22%). 

With obesity becoming a key challenge for health across Europe, it is encouraging to see that one in four shoppers (26%) are eating more healthily because they want to achieve weight loss. Spanish and Dutch shoppers are more driven by the need to lose weight in their healthy eating habits than any other country. It is perhaps surprising not to see more German or British shoppers driven by weight loss given that these countries rank among the highest in the list of European countries more than half of the population being overweight (Eurostat research from 2014). 

Growth in Healthy Eating

Across all four types of wellness food, shoppers are buying more now compared to 2-3 years ago, healthy food had increased by 41%, organic by a third (34%) and vegetarian and free-from foods by a quarter (26% and 24% respectively).
What’s more interesting though is that this sector still has far to go.  When asked in the next six months whether they intended to spend more, just under a fifth were going to increase their spend across the four different categories.

Generational Differences

There are differing motivations amongst the generations in terms of why they are seeking healthier foods, and these reasons are cumulatively driving the overall increase.  In terms of the ageing population across Europe, health naturally becomes a focus and reason for taking more care of what is consumed.

At the other end of the spectrum, we see a clear focus on health for the Millennials.  This group purchased more across all four groups.  Healthy foods in general have the highest audience, with 78% of Millennials purchasing them – eight percentage points more than the total market.  The biggest difference between this group compared to others though is vegetarian foods, which is purchased by over half of the Millennials surveyed (54%), which is 15% higher than the total market. What is clear from the results of this study is that the Millennial audience is a key one to target in the future.

How to be Healthier

In terms of what it takes to be healthy, a majority of people (60%) believe you can achieve a healthy diet by eating more fruit and vegetables.  The next most important tools to use are being more aware of what you’re buying with 29% mentioning dedicating enough time to read the ingredient list and 26% checking the nutritional fact labels.

Wellness foods are mainly sought out in supermarkets and hypermarkets, followed by bio or health-food stores.  Online stores are well positioned as alternative places to buy healthy products, offering an opportunity to improve penetration and spending for online retailers.
 
The Future for Wellness Foods

Wellness foods are clearly not the concern of just a niche group of people as they might once have been, with a small selection tucked away at the back of the supermarket. There is a huge opportunity here for manufacturers and retailers alike to tap into the growth potential across the wellness foods sector.
For manufacturers there are two ways that they can do this. Firstly, by working on the communications around their existing products, to play up their health credentials and make labelling clear and impactful.  Secondly there is room to innovate with new, healthier versions of well-loved product lines.  For retailers, helping shoppers to find and navigate the healthier product offerings and motivating them to choose them are the ways they can make the most of this opportunity.