The Seismic Shift on How Consumers will Source Meals in the Future

I believe the best talk at the Intermountain IFT Suppliers show in Sun Valley this past week, was put on by Justin Shimek, the Chief Technology Officer with Mattson, located in the San Francisco Bay area. He gave a very informative talk about the direction consumers are heading to source their food.

Brick and mortar grocery stores and restaurant business are still going to increase. The change coming is in how their ingredients and meals are prepared and delivered to the customer. This change is already taking place in many metropolitan areas where delivery can be offered rather quickly and/or in the all area where frozen and refrigerated meals and meal kits can be delivered by standard carriers as well. Some food operations even guarantee they will get the meals to you in 20 minutes or less.

One new method aptly called is set it and forget it. It is where the customer subscribes to a service and like clockwork they deliver the ingredients or meals at set times. It can be daily, weekly or monthly.

Another method has more of a scratch cooking feel to it. This is where a manufacturer puts together meal kits. That are proportioned and premeasured, then shipped frozen or refrigerated to the customer, who simply put everything together according to the recipe included in the box.

The food on demand method is where the customer shops for groceries or meals online from a retail grocery store or a restaurant. It’s either delivered to the door or they can pick it up. The restaurants that are smart will utilize their kitchens during off hours of operation, to increase their profitability. Chefs will make hand make meals and send them via delivery truck to their customers.

So it appears restaurants are becoming more like manufacturing plants for meals and grocery store are becoming like distribution points for food ingredients.

The positive side of this trend is the customer feels like they are buying local, fresh and all natural products. It’s also about convenience, speed and variety of products available through these different channels.

A possible negative side effect that was mentioned was now the customers will only have one personal point of contact with the businesses that make and assemble their food order. That one point of interaction will be the delivery driver.

Someone mentioned that the liabilities of the contract delivery services have not been addressed properly. Who’s going to take the blame for food that goes bad in transit?