trends

CPGs, Restaurants Compete With New Prepared-Meal Options

Lean CuisineFood manufacturers and restaurants alike are expanding and enhancing takeaway, prepared-meal offerings to compete with a growing number of new channels for convenient, sophisticated at-home dining. 

The options they are up against include "meal assembly" outlets, chef-branded and neighborhood boutique takeout venues, food bars/food courts and upscale packaged meals prepared in grocery chains, and even "personal chef" services that whip up a week's or month's worth of meals (sometimes in your own kitchen), ready to be pulled from the fridge or freezer, heated and served.

These trends, and advice for winning in this battle of escalating consumer expectations for easy but delicious (even exotic) at-home meal solutions, are detailed in a new report from the Center for Culinary Development (CCD) and Packaged Facts.

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Traditional restaurant chains and CPGs are already fighting back, points out the "Prepared Meal Solutions: Culinary Trend Mapping" report.

Since Outback Steakhouse pioneered curbside pickup in the mid-'90's, restaurants of all types--including some fine-dining venues--have followed suit. In fact, last year, two-thirds of full-service restaurants' customers ordered curbside at least once a month, according to CCD.

This strategy of providing restaurant-quality meals sans the dining-out element--plus free online and text-messaging/mobile ordering capabilities--will be even more important to restaurants' competitive stance going forward, the analysts stress.

Food manufacturers, meanwhile, are increasingly offering "stylish" packaged meals appealing to consumer demand for "artisanal," regional and exotic (especially Asian and Indian) foods that feature quality ingredients and regional ingredient sources. Example: The "new generation" frozen pizzas updating the bistro pies originated by Wolfgang Puck in the '80s.

For all players in the prepared-meals game, the keys are staying in constant touch with consumers' rapidly evolving convenience and taste/quality expectations, and continually honing strategies that are founded on an understanding of the core trends driving meal solutions, sums up CCD.

Those drivers include the well-established ones of consumers' focus on health/wellness and "eating adventures," as well as emerging drivers including "chef cachet," outlet convenience, local/seasonal offerings and meal-planning assistance.

In line with these, CCD recommends that CPGs consider strategies such as branded merchandise sections within supermarkets/grocery retailers that link products with a chef (so as to appeal to the allure of sophisticated, high-end prepared meals); adding restaurant-inspired sides and desserts to entrée lines; and emphasizing frozen and fresh-prepared meals that offer ingredient "purity" and "global inspiration."

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