Study seeks the answer to how consumers eat

NATIONWIDE RT REPORT—Why do consumers like home meal replacement? Why do certain fast food concepts work, while others fail? What has led to the increase in the number of hybrid food concepts in the mold of Save-A-Lot, Fresh and Easy and the soon-to-arrive Marketside? And most important, are the changes in food consumption and buying patterns a fleeting trend, or signs of bigger changes in the macro-economic climate?

As the nation’s leading food retailers try to compete for dollar and market share in today’s soft economy, these are the question on the minds of most food merchants—not to mention their strategic-minded bosses.

But sales data and intuition only tell part of the story. To put the current shifts in food retailing into perspective, a new study from The Hartman Group in Seattle seeks not only to answer where consumers are shopping and why, but also how wide-scale changes in U.S. consumer lifestyles are affecting the ways in which society prepares and/or consumes daily meals.

“Over the course of the past 20 years, we have mapped consumers’ evolutions, adoptions, migrations and aspirations in the food retailing marketplace,” said Michelle Barry, president of The Hartman Group’s Retail Intel, the driving force behind the new report called: Food Fight: Winning the Battle for Consumers’ Food Dollars. “A considerable amount of the explainable variation in shopping behavior actually has more to do with things happening in the household than it does with things happening in grocery stores or restaurants.”

In its effort to understand the cultural, lifestyle and economic shifts occurring in food consumption, the study will combine the strengths of a quantitative, nationally-representative sample of U.S. consumers and in-depth ethnographic consumer immersions to detect the relevant behaviors and trends most likely to impact food retailing in the future. The study will field in the third quarter 2008 with results available fourth quarter 2008. For more information, go to: www.Hartman-Group.com.