The Food Delivery Wars: Why Food Identities Matter
If hunger could be satisfied by meeting basic nutritional needs, we’d all be drinking Soylent. Our moms would still be double-fisting Slimfast. But we have been biologically programmed to experience taste as a source of pleasure, and food has become a cultural focal point for identity.
The desire to discover, experience and share new food proliferates our culture. There are over 2 million food blogs on the internet, over 25 million mentions of “#condiment” on Twitter and in 2011 Google received over 1 billion recipe searches a month. Chefs and food innovators achieve rock star status, and you’re more likely to be invited to an underground dinner in New York City than an underground concert. Food companies are flourishing, and even brands with successful core products are innovating to satisfy the human need for discovery — and create “better for you” foods.
There are food delivery wars that are focused on getting you food quickly, cheaply, and efficiently. They are being fought along both formatting and logistical lines. Dozens of companies are chasing business to get you groceries, restaurant meals, pre-portioned healthy boxed meals, ingredient kits with step by step recipe instructions, or a chef in your kitchen cooking for you. Demand for high quality foods, anywhere, anytime is increasing. Interest in surprise and delight will never go away. But once every company can deliver you anything within an hour, they will need a new way to inspire loyalty and satisfy our appetites.
Prioritizing consumer expectation of personalization is the next step. 3 out of 5 consumers say it’s important to be able to personalize their food at restaurants. Food discovery is a basic human desire, but food isn’t one size fits all. Current food discovery experiences are oversimplifying consumers personal desires.
Answering “What should I eat” sits at the ever-evolving intersection of “What do I want to eat?” “What is good for me?” and “What’s around?” The decision is weighted by our perspective at that moment: mood, dietary requirements, food philosophy, consciousness of health, what tastes good, texture, price, availability.
Dietary requirements are nuanced. Not everyone allergic to tree nuts is allergic to all tree nuts, and some have greater reactivity to cross contamination. People who go into anaphylactic shock, or have a true allergy to an ingredient, may vary in their requirements to protect themselves. A person with a nut allergy may not eat a food made in a facility that may contain peanuts. Those with gluten sensitivities range from people battling life threatening reactions to people willing to stomach discomfort to taste a cronut.
A “philosophy” you adhere to may or may not be flexible. Are you 100% Paleo, 80% of the time? If gluten free, do you eat oats? Strictly kosher? The most famous vegan, President Clinton, notoriously cheats with fish — and I wonder how flexible he is with honey!
Personal taste preference is based on an infinite number of cultural associations and experiences — how spicy is spicy to you? Do you hate sneaky ingredients, like cilantro, mushrooms, or garlic? Do you prefer hard crunchy chocolate chip cookies or soft gooey cookies?
Bio-individuality of diet and tastes, much like bio-individuality in medicine, is still in the dark ages. Two people with similar tastes may not have the same needs, and vice versa.
It’s not enough to show people what they can eat; they need to discover options they want to eat. Connecting your personal lens to a social layer, we can simplify that process and give people validation needed spend to money on something new.
Trust in food recommendations is established through personal recommendations and education. Whose recommendation I rely on varies based on cuisine, diet, and priorities: health, flavor, or entertainment. 38% of female shoppers cite recommendations from friends or family as the most important factor in making a purchasing decision. We actively seek targeted recommendations from our favorite bloggers, friends, or the new culture icons: chefs and diet gurus. Yet there is a clear gap in the market right now between the places we go for food recommendations and the points of purchase.
70% of consumers do research on the web before making a food purchase decision. They click back and forth between fragmented sources with incomplete information. They move from food blogs and magazines with product reviews to brand and restaurant websites, seeking ingredients, flavors, or locations they prefer. Potential customers then have to figure out where a food is sold, and whether it’s convenient and within their price range. Unfortunately, food websites are often a dead-end, as the limited data customers can access is rarely up to date. Restaurants don’t list their ingredients. Food brands don’t know where all of their products are sold, and may not list pertinent ingredient information. Compounding the difficulty, shoppers are required to perform this inefficient process on the fly each time they try something new.
Connecting the web presence of foods and retailers in an interactive social community where shoppers can discover, endorse, and learn where to buy food would improve shoppers’ experience.
In order for companies to predict what individuals and their families will want to eat, they need a system to compare trends and products, analyze ingredients, and log user preferences.
At ingredient1, our solution is to create a personal dietary profile connected to a flexible ingredient and product database, so that consumers can discover foods based on their bio-individual preferences and mood. We’re adding a social recommendation layer, to give people confidence in their food choices and increase awareness of foods that they would like. This also removes the chaos of eating with other people, by making it easy to share needs, tastes, and what you like.
With access to user preferences connected to a social map, companies can return more relevant results to their users, serve more relevant ads for food discovery, and receive high quality analytics around diet, ingredient, and food preferences.
This impacts companies at each intersection of the foodchain.
Food brands and retailers have limited information on who is buying what products. The most current info that these groups all have access to is historical, tied to point of sale or coupons. This says what a shopper bought, but not why or what their intentions were. The distribution system also severely limits what information food creators have access to.
Additionally, new foods have an estimated 82% product failure rate. The market assumes these products failed because consumers don’t want them, when in reality it could be that people don’t know about them, that the path to purchase is too unclear, or that the cost is too high.
Dig Inn and SweetGreen’s rapid growth is a clear indicator that people want “better for you” food, and producing food at scale significantly brings the cost down. With an understanding of what people want, the cost of food production can be reduced, food and recipe development cycles made more efficient, gaps in the market become clearer, and the path to achieving scale will be smoother.
For restaurant and grocery food delivery services, like Seamless and Postmates, this is the fastest path to the creation of a personal food identity that can be carried with you, wherever you are. Restaurants don’t have the technological capability or capacity to implement these systems yet. Delivery services can inspire loyalty from retailers by enabling personalization, and then providing analytics that would improve business operations.
Try Googling “Gluten Free Cookies” — it’s ineffective. You will see recipes, a few products — but not the personalized / delicious / local / natural / peer recommended solutions you’re looking for.
Food ordering and delivery platforms are arguably the most critical, and underutilized players in systematizing the thread between understanding our food ecosystem, consumer habit, and medical outcomes. Seamless, Amazon, Instacart, and Google are in a position to capture critical components of consumer and business information. In other words, what we chose to eat, what was in it, and why we made those choices.
Related Articles in Series:
1. What Should I Eat? Why No One Knows & How to Solve it
2. Why Your FitBit is Failing You: The Foundation for Personalized Nutrition
3. The Food Delivery Wars: Why Food Identities Matter
4. #FoodPorn Rescues Nutrition Science! So Snap Away…What Should I Eat?
