Meal deals: selling solutions no stuff

“Our homes may be full of cooking books but we’re nation spending less&Less time in the kitchen” this affirmation from Kantar Worldpanel make think me about my fancy colorful books from Jaime Oliver in kitchen…

32 minutes is the average of how long we spend cooking the main evening meal.

From “15 minutes” with Jamie Oliver TV program to the growth of “Tesco Finest” ready to cook/eat and “Taste-the-difference” (Sainsbury’s) we have evident changes on the shopping bag for the dinner.

So how the retailers are approaching these changes? They’re selling solutions, they’re becoming the Ikea of the food!

“10£ dinner for two” in Marks&Spencer is a good example as how a retailer can take advantage of a lack of time to cook to upsell products per trip. The meals deals are 1/3 of the revenue in the retailer.

Tesco Finest is another example of the approach to make the preparation of the dinner as fancy and ready as it’s possible.

The discounters and convenience stores are the only faces growing this year, one of the reasons is the change of the habits. I will focus on the convenience store, where we go to buy something fast for dinner.  They have a really good opportunity to grow in the mid-week evening meals. Must probably they can benefit for a switching from the main fast food chains. The clearly response from the retailers is new convenience store: as Morrison has opened 100 M local stores and Tesco 150 Tesco Express.

This open a huge spectrum of possibilities to cross categories in the meal deals to create more occasions to eat some products, for example yoghurt as a dessert if you add 1£ more… give me solution if I haven’t planned a dessert.