More Moms Staying (and Eating) at Home

October 25th, 2007 |

Now here’s something I hadn’t considered before – the decline in restaurant sales is due to an increase in Moms staying home. There is a lot of information which might be affecting the sales to restaurants and meal assembly stores. And once you read the article this site has its own interpretations which might be directly affecting the restaurant business. Specifically MA stores like Dream Dinners, Super Supper and Meal Makers are listed as having an impact.

And the article does support the idea that consumers want convenience and they want packaged meals not just packaged food.

So is there still room for MAs in the working mom and now stay at home mom lifestyle? There might be some life still left in this idea depending on the area, but it does seem that pricing and convenience will be the key factors in keeping the customers coming in. Offering to make the meals a thousand different ways is probably not going to be as much of a hook as many think.

And if you look at this article closely, the group that is increasing their cooking time is the men. That also makes you wonder if the marketing and target group may need to be changed. Men have clearly been left for dead as far as MA goes. Very little if any advertising is targeted toward them. You never know, they may be the next group who supports the meal prep industry.

Restaurants Feel the Heat as Number of Women in the Work Force Flattens

For the first time since June Cleaver donned pearls and aprons in the 1950s, the percentage of women choosing to work outside the home has been flat to down for several years running. Not coincidentally, the number of meals purchased at restaurants per person has stopped growing too, for the longest sustained stretch in the 23 years NPD Group has tracked the number.

For restaurants, it means an end to a demographic gold mine that fed decades of growth. For supermarkets, it means a reversal of a trend that fueled decades of decline and may even help savvier operators gain an edge in their long-losing battle against Wal-Mart. And for package-food companies, the trends offer a chance to gain ground on restaurants for the first time in decades.

‘Package meals’
But neither the labor nor restaurant trends are driving women back to cooking from scratch, he said. “The growth in the restaurant industry is in takeout meals,” he said. “This is not about package food anymore. It’s about package meals.”

The only segment of the population cooking more is men, who now prepare 18% of meals, according to NPD, even if they remain largely invisible to food marketers, Mr. Balzer said. “It’s young men in the new households being formed.”

Convenience, not price
An analysis Mr. Glass did last year showed Whole Foods Market is now the largest takeout casual diner in the country. “It does more takeout sales than Applebee’s, Brinker or Darden, ” he said, “and with far fewer stores.”

Its success isn’t about saving money, Mr. Balzer said, since not much at Whole Foods is cheap. “It’s convenience,” he said. “People want something they can bring home and reheat, not something that if it goes cold they’ll never want again.”

Casual-dining chains are more likely to be hurt by supermarket competition and women staying at home than fast feeders, he said, perhaps accounting for some of the relative fortunes of the two segments of late.

Mr. Glass also sees signs that package-food companies are seizing on the emerging trends to claw back some of the market they’ve lost to restaurants in decades past. He pointed to a recent TV ad for Campbell’s soup that clearly positions the product as part of an alternative to restaurant meals.

“Wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier,” she said, “if we could have restaurant-quality food at home, in the office, wherever we want it, at a fraction of the cost?”