A Survey of Modern Life: Food
Delivery Apps, Meal Kits, Groceries and Cooking Dinner
This report is the fifth in a series of reports on the results from a set of consumer surveys on health-related behaviors and the influence of popular products and services. Fielded by Building H, a project to build health into everyday life, the surveys examined the influences of products and services such as video streaming, food delivery services, automobiles, rideshare services, mapping services and mobile gaming on eating habits, physical activity, sleep and other behaviors. This report is based on surveys that focus specifically on food : one that covered grocery delivery services, one on meal delivery services, and one on meal kits; as well as relevant information from other surveys. More information on the survey project can be found here.
Key Findings
- Survey respondents were generally positive about the impact of their diets on their health, with more indicating a positive impact (42.9%) than a negative impact (20.2%).
- 58.1% of respondents eat home-cooked meals five or more nights per week. Cooking at home varies considerably by income, with the likelihood of cooking at home five or more nights per week generally rising with increasing income brackets.
- Nearly 80% of meal kit users said that meal kit meals were healthier than (33.5%) or as healthy as (46.0%) the meals they cooked for themselves. In addition, 69.1% of users said that their meal kit meals were healthier than meals that they got via delivery or takeout.
- Over 90% of users of online grocery delivery services said that their groceries were healthier (67.9%) or as healthy as (23.2%) takeout or delivery meals.
- Food delivery users say that their order most frequently replaces cooking their own meal (47.9%). 6.7% indicate that if they hadn’t ordered a meal, they normally wouldn’t have eaten otherwise.
Introduction
Building H developed a set of 10 surveys of American adults that looked at the prevalence of five important health-related behaviors and one potentially unhealthy behavior, use of selected consumer products and services, and attitudes toward corporate responsibility for health impacts.
Questions across two general surveys asked about sleep, physical activity, spending time with friends, getting outdoors, screen time and eating patterns. Additional surveys assessed the impact of different types of products and services — video streaming, mobile gaming, ride-share, mapping and directions apps, food and grocery delivery services — on different health behaviors. The surveys on food services — meal kits, grocery delivery services and food delivery services — are the focus of this report, which also draws from the general surveys on health behaviors and attitudes and questions from a survey on video streaming services.
The surveys were conducted using Google Consumer Surveys in December, 2020. Sample sizes varied from 700 adults (18 years or older) in the U.S. for the meal kit survey to 1,000 for the surveys on grocery delivery and food delivery services to 5,000 respondents for the general surveys. Samples were chosen to represent the U.S. population distribution across ages, genders, races, and geographic regions.
General surveys questioned participants on both their experiences with and attitudes towards health behaviors (i.e. sleep, socialization, time spent outdoors, eating patterns and physical activity). The product specific surveys questioned participants who use specific products like grocery delivery and food delivery apps on how they use the services, and the services’ effects on eating habits. For example, the meal kit and food delivery services surveys asked about how frequently the services were used and how healthy the meals were compared to alternatives. All surveys asked respondents how often they cooked dinner at home.
Findings
Use of services
- Approximately 5% of our overall sample (generally representation of adult U.S. residents) use a meal kit service like Blue Apron, Hello Fresh or Home Chef; approximately 10% use an online grocery delivery service like Instacart or FreshDirect at least once a month; and approximately 17% of our overall sample use a food delivery service like DoorDash, Uber Eats or GrubHub at least monthly.
- A majority of meal kit users cook with them three or more times a week.
- 26.8% of meal kit subscribers order take-out less often, 25.3% eat out at restaurants less often and 16.8% cook from scratch less often as a result of using the meal kit service.
- Meal kits are associated with a social experience: 62.4% of users eat their meals mostly with family; only 23% eat them mostly alone.
- The majority of grocery delivery service users use it once or twice a month; although 17% use it five or more times a month. Nearly 80% of users continued to shop for groceries in person at least once a month, with 46.3% of users doing so more than twice per month.
- Users of grocery delivery services generally have positive social expereinces when they do shop in person. 54.1% of shoppers rated their interactions with employees and other customers as positive (37.0%) or very positive (17.1%). 9.2% rated them as negative (5.4%) or very negative (3.8%).
- A majority (56.3%) of food delivery users order from the service once or twice per month.
- Food delivery users more often order from restaurants (27.6% say usually or always), than from fast food restaurants (18.0%) or convenience stores (10.9%).
- Food delivery users say that their order most frequently replaces cooking their own meal (47.9%). 6.7% indicate that if they hadn’t ordered a meal, they normally wouldn’t have eaten otherwise.
Healthfulness of Meals
In the general surveys, we asked people about the healthfulness of their diets. Respondents were generally positive about the impact of their diets on their health, with more indicating a positive impact (42.9%) than a negative impact (20.2%).
We asked users of the meal kit and online grocery services if the meals they ate were typically healthier than the alternatives.
- Nearly 80% of meal kit users said that meal kit meals were healthier than (33.5%) or as healthy as (46.0%) the meals they cooked for themselves. In addition, 69.1% of users said that their meal kit meals were healthier than meals that they got via delivery or takeout.
- Over 90% of online grocery delivery services users said that their groceries were healthier (67.9%) or as healthy as (23.2%) takeout or delivery meals.
Cooking dinner at home
Across all services, we asked people how often they cooked meals at home. As a baseline, 58.1% of respondents eat home-cooked meals five or more nights per week. This figure varied considerably among users of the meal kit (34.7%), grocery delivery service (50.8%) and food delivery service users (37.1%).
Cooking at home also varied considerably by income, with the likelihood of cooking at home five or more nights per week generally rising with increasing income brackets. People making less than $25,000 per year or between $25,000 and $50,000 were also far more likely to cook two or fewer nights per week than people making over $150,000.
Differences were also found by race and ethnicity. While the sample was too small to support meaningful comparisons across specific racial and ethnic groups, white respondents were more likely (59.8%) than non-whites (40.6%) to cook dinner five or more nights per week and less likely (14.1% to 31.8%) to cook dinner two or fewer nights per week. These differences are not independent of income and thus could well be entangled with racial differences in income.
Television and Food
In our survey of video streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, we asked users how often they eat meals or snacks while watching. 63.7% eat at least one meal per week and 15.0% report eating one or more meals per day while streaming. 59.2% report snacking sometimes (34.5%), usually (16.0%) or always (8.7%) while streaming. Eating while streaming increases significantly as streaming time goes up: 36.9% of people who stream for more than four hours per day report eating more than one meal per day and 48.8% of those users report snacking usually (20.0%) or always (28.8%) while watching.
Discussion
We chose to focus on the question of how often people cook dinner at home because, generally speaking, meals cooked at home tend to be healthier than meals eaten at restaurants, especially fast food restaurants. There is a long-term shift away from home-cooked meals in favor of alternatives such as eating out at restaurants, getting takeout or delivery from restaurants, and eating prepared, ready-to-eat meals — and Americans now spend more money on food eaten outside the home than inside. The trend is troubling because, in general, meals cooked at home tend to be healthier than meals eaten at restaurants, especially fast food restaurants. The results of the surveys, which showed that just 58% of people cook dinner five or more nights per week confirm the trend, but they also show that the practice — of cooking dinner at home — is becoming something of a luxury experience as it frequency rises with income. The differences in cooking between white and non-white populations underscore this concern. While there might be multiple explanations for the correlation, including knowledge, capability or confidence differences and the marketing of fast foods to lower income populations, one possible explanation is time. Given the amount of time necessary to shop for, prepare, cook and clean up a meal, those with more leisure time or who have greater control of or flexibility in their time, might have greater ability to dedicate it to cooking dinner.
A surprising finding is, despite the broad scientific consensus that the American diet is broady unhealthy (and leading to such health consequences as obesity, diabetes and heart disease), respondents generally felt positively about the impact that their diet is having on their health. This result suggests either an information gap or perhaps the parochial view that Americans’ diets are bad in general but my own is good.
The surveys focusing on use of meal kits, grocery delivery and food delivery services were intended to shed light on how those services are affecting people’s eating habits. The first finding to note is that services are still relatively new (the leading companies in each of these categories were formed within the last 10 years) and their penetration of the market is still relatively small (ranging from 5% to 17%). Meal kits do offer some hope for creating healthy options for people — as users broadly rate them as healthier than their alternatives — although their relatively high cost (on the order of $9 to $10 per serving) creates a barrier for people with lower incomes. Online grocery delivery services like Instacart also create opportunity in that users rate the food they order to be relatively healthy and that using the service certainly lowers the barrier to obtaining fresh food for preparing and cooking. Food delivery services like DoorDash raise more concern and they often substitute restaurant or fast food meals for home cooked meals.
Interestingly, users of all three types of services cook dinner less often than the general population. (The most surprising finding of this type was that meal kit subscribers cook less often than users of food delivery services.) The most logical explanation for this finding again relates to time. Insofar as all three types of services are time savers, it might well be that their users tend to be more busy than the general population and thus less likely to cook.
Conclusion
The food industry is undergoing rapid innovation and change. Services created in the past decade, such as meal kits, online grocery and food delivery apps, are being joined by new entrants like ghost kitchens, plant-based meat and dairy alternatives, and 15-minute delivery apps. These innovations appear against a backdrop of shifting habits — as more Americans opt for convenient alternatives to cooking their own meals — and epidemics of obesity, specifically, and chronic disease, more broadly, that have been linked in part to dietary practices. As these innovations play out, it is imperative to understand the effects that they have on people’s diets and thus their health. The findings of these surveys suggest that the services we studied are having mixed effects and hold both promise and concern. The convenience they offer can be valuable to people; but we must be vigilant about ensuring that it does not come at the cost of worsening health.
Acknowledgments
Thomas Goetz, Sara Singer, Carlo Martinez and Brittany Sigler all contributed to the conceptualization and development of the surveys; Carlo Martinez contributed data analysis.
