-By Harvey Hartman

Harvey Hartman

More and more American consumers are cooking and eating at home. That's not in dispute. People are actually taking the time and making the effort to prepare meals—and we're not talking here of Monday meatloaf, Saturday mac and cheese, or salad with a splash of dressing. Cutting across nearly all age groups, today's consumers are expressing interest in preparing a truly globalized range of cuisines at home. And with a new generation of consumers growing up to be one of the most epicurean on record, the future for convenience food products is bright indeed.

The thought that consumers might value convenience comes as no surprise, of course. Hartman Group research finds that about two-thirds (66 percent) of consumers say it's very, if not extremely, important to them when shopping for foods and beverages.

So consumers value convenience—but what level of assistance are consumers looking for from food companies? For its part, the food industry, broadly construed, has identified and solved the problem of convenience for us, over and over again. We now enjoy convenient parking, convenient locations, entire convenience stores, and, of course, convenience foods. Yet are these offerings really in step with today's convenience-minded consumers?

From World War II on, convenience foods have transformed the way entire generations of American consumers cook and savor food. Even today, the role of convenience foods in American kitchens and diets 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 at The Hartman Group 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 meal solution.
Throughout the colorful history of convenience foods, there has been tension between convenience as "solution" and convenience as "helper."

The early history of convenience foods shows a gradual movement away from marketers presenting mere kitchen helpers, to presenting full meal solutions. This industry shift occurred in an era when patronizing sit-down restaurants was reserved for special occasions. In other words, when America wasn't actively changing its food preferences or tastes (except for a tiny elite), it made sense to consumers and the industry to evolve from convenience as helper to convenience as complete meal solution, at least for less interesting, everyday meals.

What's cooking today

More recent trends, however, show that consumers are actually moving in the opposite direction, back toward "helper" convenience, even if sales of "complete solutions" may be strong enough currently to mask this change. Our research has found the surging interest in defining convenience as products that assist, rather than replace, home cooking. These are especially what consumers are looking for on dinner occasions when they actually want to make a fresh, home-cooked meal.

In a nationwide survey, we looked at the broad continuum of convenience products (encompassing those that speed up or simplify meal preparation) to examine relative interest in convenience products that offer help, vs. those that replace home cooking. What we found is that all Americans use both categories of convenience products.

It used to be enough for packaged food makers to box or jar established flavors and food experiences under the rubric of convenience. No more. Now the key challenge is to understand the curious connections between trends on the restaurant scene and in the American home-cooked meal.

Harvey Hartman is founder, chairman, and c.e.o. of The Hartman Group, a leading consulting and consumer insights firm specializing in the analysis and interpretation of consumer lifestyles, and how these lifestyles affect the purchase and use of today's products and services in tomorrow's marketplace. Harvey can be reached at harvey@hartman-group.com.