Health and culinary culture influences choices

Once upon a time snacking might have been a bag of chips, tub cheese and crackers, or a box of raisins – and consumed primarily in between formal meals.

Snack occasion growth has accelerated to a point where it is no longer a unique event and changed into a form of continuous eating behavior – mostly hand-held mini-meals. Driving this development is a shift from scheduling around meal periods to eating around schedules.

A recent study of Millennial preferences from the Private Label Manufacturers Association (PLMA), pegged the importance of meal portability, finding:

• 6 percent of Millennials do not have a set schedule for meals
• 3 percent eat on the run, and
• 7 percent work and eat at the same time

Separately, a February 2016 report from The Hartman Group stated, “Snacks can be anywhere and anything, and are playing an increasingly diverse role in people’s food lives and food culture.”

That same report confirmed 80 percent of all snacking is ‘purposeful’ – answering specific desires for physical fuel ups, emotional comfort, flavor experimentation and helping enable social connections.

It should be noted, there’s an ‘influence’ factor at work here: health and nutrition experts weigh in to observe that eating smaller meals more often is just better for your health generally.

Snack Diversity is Building

Meantime the nation’s palate has also shifted to preference for higher quality food experiences. We’ve characterized this in previous posts as the “Foodie-ization of America.” It seems only logical that snacking would elevate alongside these changes, whether it is to healthier choices or epicurean adventures.

1. The cheese industry has taken notice of this change in snacking behavior. Our client, Schuman Cheese, continues expansion of its unique and flavor-dense Cello® Whisps – a line of clean-ingredient, savory Parmesan crisp snacks. Sargento enhances the dairy aisle with combinations of dried fruit, nuts and cheeses in the new and price friendly Balanced Breaks line.

2. New entries permeate the chip category. Way Better® Snacks pioneers an evolution in bagged options, made with better-for-you sprouted grains. While Beanitos® creates a flavor-diverse line of chips derived from GMO-free beans.

3. A dizzying array of new protein players like EPIC®, KRAVE® and New Primal are accelerating growth of paleo-friendly meat bars and jerky products – with exotic flavor combinations (while eliminating of some of the egregious preservative ingredients).

4. Yogurt continues its meteoric rise as multi-benefit snack option, meal replacement, recipe ingredient, protein source and pro-biotic solution. Noosa® caters to the indulgent segment, while new players like Blue Hill offer savory versions, Fage® Crossovers with chef-inspired flavors and nut pairings, and Chobani® continues to steamroll through virtually every sector.

Culinary Inspiration – Hillshire®

A leading indicator of the interest in higher quality choices is Hillshire Snacking’s new self-characterized “Fancy Snacking” Small Plates line of cheese, meats, crisps, nuts and dried fruits.

Interesting taste combinations like Tuscan Flair and Latin Fiesta are presented in portioned trays that allow the consumer to customize amounts of each item for the perfect bite. The product rolls up convenience, portion control, elevated quality and unique pairings into one experience.

We predict this could be a home run for Hillshire as it is on point with food culture changes now driving growth categories in food and beverage.

Where is retail strategy in the snack juggernaut?

We continue to believe snacking is such a significant and important behavior, representing an expanding arena for innovation, that it deserves more consideration at retail as a specific shopping destination – beyond the existing chip aisle.

Why not make the shopping experience more of an adventure while acknowledging that snack is no longer a confined occasion, by creating centers at retail where various forms and types can be merchandised collectively. Doing this takes friction out of the shopping experience and, we believe, will help increase sales in this accelerating business.

Guidance: the PLMA report also revealed the importance of healthier choice to Millennials stating 78.7 percent are interested in healthy options, 77.9 percent care about the nutritional value of food, and 73.9 percent read nutrition labels.

Snacking behavior is a cultural condition that will continue to attract new solutions and innovation in our increasingly mobile, portable lifestyles.

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Quality and craftsmanship has a new form of expression

Fairfield, New Jersey-based Schuman Cheese, a market share leader in the U.S. Italian cheese business, recently announced the cheese industry’s first product trust mark – True Cheese®. It is intended to provide validation and verification that products bearing the seal are true, real and correctly labeled.

Full disclosure: We represent Schuman and played a role in developing this program.

The backstory here is important: The Italian cheese category in the U.S. has been rife with adulterated and mislabeled products for decades. Operating behind a curtain, economically motivated food fraud has existed primarily because more profit can be extracted by diluting (and then misrepresenting) the quality of ingredients. This practice is followed by some less principled players despite the fact the entire process is illegal. What’s labeled “Parmesan cheese” in some cases just isn’t.

It is indeed a rare thing when a leading company jumps into this arena to address a well-established form of misbehavior. Schuman is an exceptionally principled organization run by a passionate CEO in Neal Schuman, who sees the existence of adulteration as a bona fide blight on quality perceptions of the category they lead.

There’s a new sheriff in town: the mindful consumer

So yes, True Cheese represents a verification of products displaying the mark that, indeed, they are correctly made, using the right ingredients and properly labeled – validated by an outside third party testing organization (Covance Food Solutions).

That said there’s another very important story at work here…

Millennial consumers, 90 million strong, are exercising their strength and numbers in new and interesting ways in the food industry. They are helping usher in a new era in food brand marketing shaped by different perceptions and values, and driven by new behaviors in purchase motivation.

For decades food brands went to market believing taste, price and convenience messages were the only real motivating purchase drivers. A comprehensive consumer study announced earlier this year by Deloitte and the Food Marketing Institute, documented for the first time considerations such as safety, transparency, social impact and health and wellness are taking the lead in food purchases.

Numerous ethnographic studies released over the last three years by The Hartman Group, show a seismic shift in the population across all age and economic segments, towards preference for higher quality, responsibly made and authentic food experiences.

This is the age of the mindful consumer. They look just as hard at a company’s beliefs and visibility to their supply chain, as they do to label integrity, and sustainability claims. They are quite capable of quickly separating self-reverential statements of taste superiority from legitimate proof points of what goes into the product and how its produced (having something quite important to do with aforementioned quality expectations).

So now, True Cheese becomes a new way to step into a more reasoned and “mindful” conversation about quality and craftsmanship. Proof the product was made with the right ingredients. Proof it is actually Parmesan and not a cheap imitator. Moreover, it’s a gateway to conveying the quality of the milk used, as well as the practices and standards followed at the dairy farm, and a commitment to integrity and tradition in cheese making.

Served up in a manner both relevant to and appropriate for a consumer who is actually interested, engaged and cares about these very things.

What’s at stake here is trust, the most important and occasionally overlooked often under-played component of achieving brand traction and growth. This is especially important in an era when consumers are in complete control of any brand relationship.

Achieving trust is not easy when reports of integrity violations hit the headlines routinely in nearly every aspect of life. People want to believe. They also want to know WHY they should believe.

Thus, a trust mark isn’t merely about assurance, it is also about how to separate and elevate a brand by verifying the story that sits underneath its creation.

Products from one brand to the next may follow similar processes and approaches to how things are made. Technology superiority is both hard to achieve and nearly impossible to sustain. But brand integrity and communication are own-able – in part because it is a mirror held up closely to the values and beliefs of the organization that espouses it.

The world is hungry for this kind of reassurance. True Cheese helps usher in a new conversation.

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