Home Cooking — It’s Baaaack!
Years ago, when I had a laundry product client, I wanted to do a PR campaign to promote using cloth diapers just one day a week to minimize disposables in the landfill. Thank heavens we didn’t try it. Who would give up a convenient behavior — using disposable diapers — for such an inconvenient option? It would take a lot more green commitment than could be inspired by a PR program to effect that revolution.
Until recently, the same was true of another convenient behavior, eating out. With foodservice sales increasing year upon year, family cooks were ready to hang up the apron. But not so fast. Home cooking is back with a vengence. With the economy in a tailspin, more consumers are going home to the range.
And that’s not likely to change anytime soon. Despite good news about the second-largest harvest of American corn, ever, and projections of record-breaking harvests of wheat and oilseeds from the world’s farmers this year, The Wall Street Journal reports that bumper crops will not offset increasing world demand.
The Food Marketing Institute U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends 2008 survey found that Americans are cooking more at home (71 percent) and buying fewer luxury foods (67 percent) and more store brand items (60 precent).
This is a real opportunity for food marketers because consumers are motivated to cook again. Create brand loyalty by being the one to provide recipes and product usage ideas for your branded products that are quick and easy. Assist cooking illiterates — the younger generations of adults whose working mothers didn’t have time to teach them to cook — with useful advice for getting dinner on the table. But don’t just churn out recipes. Think about what consumers need to be successful in the kitchen and help them get there.
Then promote your cooking solutions like crazy through advertising, in-store promotions, on your Web site — anywhere you can own an educational platform. Since consumers tend to cycle ten or so dinnertime ideas over and over, getting into the cycle means selling your products again and again.
But a word to the wise. Be sure to check out a funny story by Kim Severson in The New York Times about “recipe deal breakers — those ingredients or instructions that make them throw down the whisk and walk away.” And read more real people follow-up in Serious Eats. Hint: no specialized equipment or unusual ingredients; nothing that takes more than a few hours in advance like brining, marinating, proofing; cooking anything to the soft ball stage….
INSIGHT: Cheap, good, fast — the adage says, pick two. But if you can create recipes that do all three, you can win cooking converts to your food ingredient products for life — not just in economic downtimes.
