Gross-ery Shopping (Part 2)
Continued from Gross-ery Shopping (Part 1)
Generally, there are 3 ways of getting meals to eat:
- Buying from a grocery store, and making food at home.
- Buying from food establishments, and eating out.
- Going to Costco and filling up on samples.
The truth is, buying from a grocery store and making food at home is becoming less popular amongst millenials. Eddie Yoon over at HBR says that the top 25 food and beverage companies have lost $18 billion in market share since 2009. Statistics Canada says 54% of Canadians eat out multiple times per week, and 40% of them attribute it to convenience.
And that’s the generally accepted dialogue — millennials are time strapped. But what’s the reason they’re time strapped?
We’re spending more time on social media, working longer hours and that reduces the time given to cooking. So, that begs the question from the other side of the coin: how much time is asked from cooking? I think that’s a function of your cooking skills, and how well they match the meals you want to eat.
If you don’t have much practice with cooking, it’ll take forever to figure out:
- What to make, which drives what to buy
- How much to make, which drives how much to buy
- How to make it, which drives what to learn
The whole process takes time, and the last part may well be the limiting reagent to what you can actually enjoy, too. Since we’ve exposed our taste palate to so many different and complex cuisines, the chances are we won’t always be able to make what we’re craving, shoutout to Osmow’s.
So, what’s the path forward for grocery stores? Let’s look at it from a design perspective and try to find the sweet spot between desirability, viability and feasibility.
Desirability: What to buy
Online grocery apps like Instacart are working to undertand how to make grocery shopping desirable for a user. As mentioned in the previous post, I wouldn’t mind sharing:
- Dietary restrictions, to weed out meat ingredients I wouldn’t buy as a vegetarian.
- Dietary preferences, to emphasize ingredients for cuisines or dishes I enjoy.
- Dietary goals, to ensure I’m getting what the doctor recommends me, between reducing sugar and increasing iron.
Viability: How much to buy
Suppose we’re now recommending a shopping list that works backwards from the set of meals that match a user’s desires and needs. That sounds cool until I realize I’m just one person, and I run into the inevitable quantity problem. I don’t need an entire loaf of bread for 1 simple grilled cheese sandwich, and I don’t want to buy an entire loaf of bread because I’ll be eating grilled cheese for the rest of the week. But what if I share groceries with my roommates, friends or neigbours in a group-buying situation? What if the loaf also contributed to several other bread-based meals? That could make the shopping list a much more viable purchase. I’m not overspending which is the entire purpose of buying groceries, and I get the right bang for my buck.
It’s also important to consider what you already have in your fridge to deternine how much to buy. It’s a crazy idea, but in addition to information about myself, I’d also be willing to share what’s in my fridge. I’d even be loyal to one grocery shopping app if it connected to a smart fridge and told me what I have in stock so I can pass on certain ingredients like the butter for my grilled cheese sandwich.
Feasibility: What to learn
We’ve figured out what to buy and how much to buy, but the final qualifier is if I can actually make what I want from what I buy. That comes back to my skill. I may have all the ingredients, but if I can’t cook something fast or well enough, it’s better to buy than build. There are a ton of meals I could desire, and a ton of ingredients I could purchase, but is it worth learning to cook it?
Instead of boiling the ocean, let’s take a subtractive approach: if you’re having a falafel sandwich once a month, it’s just 12 of your 1,473 eating occasions in the year. But if you’re having a grilled cheese sandwich once a week for a late night snack every Friday, it’s 3% of your annual eating occasions. That may be something you know how to make. And if you don’t, it may be worth learning. So, no, I’m not recommending grocery stores and CPGs to get onto the Grade 11 Food & Nutrition curriculum. But maybe an app like Instacart can simply ask what you know how to make to form the basis of a realm of possible meals.
Yes, it’s tricky to collect sensitive consumer information, make group buying or cross-recipe-ingredient-splitting into a thing, and figuring out what meals are most feasible. But it just may create a grocery shopping experience that gels with the future consumer of the world. There are a ton of factors at work here for this complex problem, but they are all working to cut down the 50,000+ SKUs available to you at a grocery store. The resulting recommendation for me may in fact be ingredients to make a handful of meals consisting of burritos, sandwiches, pasta and bagels with cream cheese. But truthfully, that already sounds like most of my week’s eating out.
Or, maybe I just buy a Costco membership.
