I have seen a lot of trends come and go in my life, from hairstyles to fashion to entertainment preferences. I’ve even seen a huge shift in eating trends, too, but what I never imagined we’d see because of that trend are US consumers spending more on food at restaurants/bars than at grocery stores each month. The new eating trends are now changing everything about grocery shopping. If this trend, fueled by millennials, continues, we could see the end of the supermarket as we know it. Here’s why:
People have more money: As the economy has rebounded, so have paycheck amounts. When people have more disposable income, we see an increase in convenience spending such as dining out.
Households are smaller: Millennials aren’t having kids as early as previous generations. And when there are fewer mouths to feed, your eating habits can be more flexible. Less stocking up and more daily food purchases. Smaller households also equate to more expendable income.
Eating habits have changed: There’s a shift to mindful eating, clean eating, veganism, raw and fermented food diets, and desires to eat local. Many restaurants have capitalized on that shift and have adapted their menus around those eating habits. That makes people more likely to run out and get the foods they prefer already prepared for them.
Shoppers have more options: In 2005, 2/3rds of Americans spent their entire weekly food budget at a supermarket. Now that percentage is less than half. People are now using those dollars at health food stores, farmers’ markets, bulk food stores, and online.
The art of cooking is dying: This makes me terribly sad, but I have seen it to be true! People no longer cook food from scratch on a regular basis. Some say convenience is the reason, but many simply don’t know how. Older generations are not passing on their cooking talents and recipes, so the younger generations tend to go for prepacked, easily prepped or done-for-you meals.
All of this combined equates to fewer weekly, stuff-your-cart shopping trips, and that, in turn, is causing supermarket profits to plummet.
Do you see this in your life? Do you hit up the supermarket as often as your parents? Do you eat out more than you did growing up? Do you think we’ll see major shifts in grocery stores in an effort to accommodate these trends?
Let me know what you think!
~Mavis
Anna says
Im mid thirties, married and with one almost toddler :). We’ve always cooked the majority of our meals at home although we do enjoy eating out or grabbing a convenient to go meal from time to time. Neither my husband or I mind cooking and we do like knowing how our food was prepped and what exactly is in it :). I also enjoy baking and other home maker type things :), its a skill I continually aim to improve. I grew up in a family that ate and cooked from scratch and so I take pride in that and also see the value! As much as eating out can be delicious, convenient and stress free, there’s really nothing like a home cooked meal.
As far as shopping goes, I enjoy selecting groceries and I am very thankful for the luxury. We primarily shop at health food stores, Trader Joe’s, farmers market etc. I do go to Costco for bulk but rarely go to the traditional grocery store.
Suzy says
I have friends that use services like Blue Plate that ship the ingredients and recipe to your home. Some are doing this to get ideas and others do it for the fun of it. Also, what you said about some people just not knowing how to cook is true. Sad, but true.
Lisa L. says
My dairy is delivered by Smith Brothers, the majority of my produce comes from a CSA membership summer through fall and I get a lot my staples from Amazon and Vine. That leaves Costco and Fred Meyer to fill in the rest. I used to spend a lot of my time shoppbg in the grocery store, and now not much at all.
Tejas Prairie Hen says
This viewpoint is interesting. From what I read online and Facebook, the younger generstions are embracing cooking vegan, grain-free, organic– whatever they feel strongly about for the sake of health, animals, and money. There are hundreds of blogs about cooking from scratch, complete with recipes and tutorials. Even blogs about keeping the food budget low and not eating out. Grocery store parking lots are ways full here, and there are never enough parking spots at the farmers’ markets.
Cheri says
Agreed. To me, it seems like healthy cooking is booming, not falling by the wayside.
Patty says
Mavis,
The economy has NOT rebounded. 95 million people are out of work. Maybe in your neck of the woods, jobs are a little more plentiful, but not so for the rest of the US.
Ilene says
Ya know, I have to agree 100% with this statement. My husband and are both making less and living on less then we did 10 years ago.
Kim says
I have been out of work for over a year and actively searching for a job for most of that time. Only jobs out there in significant numbers are low income and part time jobs. That unemployment rate they keep telling us is so low is NOT accurate.
When I left my job last October, I was only making a little over my 2003 salary after ten years of working for the same company.
Leslie says
I think it’s actually 15 million. Unemployment is currently 4.9% (versus 9% a few years ago- yay!) and the US population is 318.9 million.
I didn’t look up any information about salary though. Just employment.
Laura says
What that number leaves out though, Leslie, is the numbers of people who have left the work force because they cannot find a job. My husband is one of those. We have gone without income for almost 4 years living on our children’s 529 college funds. We have a high school senior about to go to college and we are hoping for good financial aid because we have stretched that money as far as we can, but it won’t cover our mortgage and his college tuition.
We cook everything from scratch and basically never eat out. Not complaining about that, just our reality. I can’t imagine buying all my food from expensive health food stores or Whole Paycheck, but with three kids that is just not possible. Not judging those who do, good for them, but we can’t and now that I have managed on so little, I doubt I could spend it even if I had it!
Leslie says
Oh gotcha- so how do you come up with 95 million? Sounds like you guys are really straining. Good luck.
Patrice says
I don’t think it is just millennials. I’m a baby boomer on my way to retirement. My kids have flown the nest, so I’m not shopping and cooking like I used to. And frankly, I’m tired! So I’m more choosy about my time and how I spend it. I like letting someone else cook and clean up afterwards.
Maria says
That’s exactly like my baby boomer parents!
Marybeth says
My Daughter (23) moved out of state earlier this year and won’t make it home for Thanksgiving. She called Saturday to get the recipes for the stuffing and candied yams. She knows how to cook everything else. She is doing all the cooking. Her boyfriend and his 3 roommates are paying for it all. They will also do the clean up. The only thing on our table from a can will be Ocean Spray cranberry sauce. We love it. Everything else is from scratch. My 2 teenagers help me cook all the time so when they move out they can do it. We love farmers markets and farm stands. I could live at BJ’s.
AlysonRR says
Isn’t it funny that Ocean Spray sauce in a can still appears on so many tables? I’ve been making ours for years, but my dad still insisted on having the jelly version of the canned cranberry sauce, LOL.
Patty M. says
I think part of the trend has to do with so many younger people don’t know how to cook from scratch. Home Ec. used to teach this but alas it’s went by the wayside also. It makes me sad! I’ve tried to give different ones produce from my garden and they didn’t want it because they didn’t know how to fix it or just didn’t want to spend the time.
Mel says
I’ve noticed that as well. I don’t think it’s the case for all young people of course, and I am a millennial who learned to cook without home ec, but I have a friend who eats Cheetos for dinner every night. Another friend thinks I’m absolutely crazy for having a garden. I’m not sure how fairly common things like cooking and gardening became so very unusual.
Maria says
I am a Gen X mom of 4 kids and hubby. In my 20’s I relied on grocery store, and eating out! In my 30’s my family grew, groceries and gas prices increased, our mortgage increased, and our paychecks shrunk or stayed stagnent. So we had to get creative. Now in my 40’s we are learning new skills, and are “hungry” to learn the ways of our traditionalist grandparents, who are no longer with us. We grow a lot if our food, and glean fields. We also buy in bulk through farmers, farmer markets, Amazon, Bountiful Basket, and Zaycon. We can a lot of foods, and barter with family, friends and neighbors. We even hunt deals on FB groups. We still use grocery stores but not as heavily as before. There are so many options now than just a traditional grocery store. We cook all our meals and don’t eat out but a couple times a year. My parents are empty nest baby boomers and have more in common with millenials then they would like to admit. They both don’t cook much at home, and eat out a lot!
Zoe says
Well I’m a millennial with a gigantic garden and I cook three times a day. Guess I don’t fit the norm but you already knew that
Mavis Butterfield says
You are not normal Z. And that is a good thing. But I think you are pretty perfect so don’t change.
Zoe says
Haha! Well thanks 🙂
Jenny says
I am in my mid 30’s and love to cook! Most of our meals are fron scratch, but we do eat out on occasion or get convenience food. I used to extreme coupon, but have since gone away from it. Both of my children (boys 7 and 3) would rather eat home cooking (recent fiasco with a can of green beans with my 7 year old to which I got a look of disgust and was told to “never ever feed this to me again”). They are both learning to cook and garden…you are welcome future spouses
Julia says
Oh my gosh, I had a similar experienc with canned green beans and my 12 year old son!! The only way he likes canned gbeans is dramatic Ned and soaked in Apple cider vinegar, like a quick pickle. I cook or prepare 99% of our meals, for health, taste, and finance reasons. While my mom was a stay at home mom who cooked all our meals I didn’t learn to cook till I moved out on my own.
Carrie says
I had my 7 year old niece over for dinner and her mom told me she liked peas so I fixed frozen sweet peas with a little butter and she refused to eat them. She only eats peas from the can. YUCK!
Katrina says
I am a Baby Boomer, who downsized from a home with a chef friendly kitchen, to a home with a very small kitchen. We do not have the counter space to cook like we used to. We work long hours, so it is more convenient to eat out or pick up carry out 3-4 times a week. On weekends, I may do a large crock pot meal or do a grill Sunday where we do grilled pork, chicken, and steak and eat off it for lunches during the week. We just find we are too busy to do a dinner from scratch anymore and the convenience to just pick up our favorite meals on the way home is just too easy.
Linda says
I too am a baby boomer,but I still cook 99.9% of our meals, including breakfast every morning. I have 6 raised beds that I grow most of our veggies.shop farmer’s market for the ones i don’t and shop at the supermarket once a week. Husband is retired and on ss
Not a lot of money for eating out.Also find that we feel healthier when eating what we grow or know where it came from
Mel says
For me, it’s the opposite. I grew up eating out every night. My parents did not cook or shop for food. Having been raised that way, it seems like such a luxury to be able to cook from scratch and grow a vegetable garden, so we still spend most of our food budget at the supermarket.
I do dislike the grocery store though. I’d prefer to shop at the farmer’s market more, but we only have 1 nearby, and the hours are terrible. And I think my garden is actually a subconscious attempt to avoid the grocery store. We just harvested our first batch of saffron this week, and I’ve been toying with the idea of ginger plants for next year, so I guess I just moved a bit closer to that goal.
Brianna says
I’m mid-30’s with 3 young kids and I pretty much keep a pantry full of ingredients and not convenience items to cook from scratch. My hubby grew up on boxed preservative-laden goodness and I have mostly converted his tastebuds after 13 years to homemade foods. I hate grocery shopping more than anything and find it to be such a time waster, but I have no choice. I’ve been to the farmers market, but $6 for a head of leaf lettuce is just too much. I live in a city with tons of international cuisine and it is too easy to find something I am in the mood for and to have instant gratification, but I just use it as an excuse to try something new in the kitchen and keep my $40 I would have spent dining out in my pocket. So many of my neighbors subscribe to home delivery meal kits, as my street is littered with all of the boxes and packaging on trash day, but I could not imagine having someone else pre-cut my ingredients because who knows how regulated it is and with all of the food recalls it makes me nervous. If I do eat out it is because the hubby is out of town for months and I only allow 1 meal a week for sanity sake. I do it mostly because I just need a time to just not have to clean up and to be waited on.
Sarah says
I am late 20s and my husband is mid 30s and we very rarely eat out. The amount we spend on food is insane! And we very rarely eat out. We find the quality much better when you cook from scratch, or as close to it. We also both pack lunches everyday for work. Knowing what our food bill is now with shopping at the grocery store, I can’t imagine what it would be if we primarily ate out.
gina says
I’m 54 so I guess a baby boomer, BOOM! It’s my husband, my 15 year old snarky daughter and me, that’s it and I still cook at home most nights. Friday nights we ALWAYS order pizza, it’s their jam! Saturdays we go out to eat. M-F I’m in the kitchen cooking up international delights they’ve all grown to love over the years, lol- NOT. I’m not a fancy cook. Tacos, spaghetti, roasts in the crock, baked chicken, meatballs, etc. I do go to the grocery store once a week. The produce always goes so fast and the price is going up, up UP! IF i can crank out a home cooked meal for less than twenty bucks, I consider it a win. When we go out to eat, it usually costs the 3 of us at least 45-50 bucks so cooking at home does seem to save us money. Now, when our daughter leaves the nest, I can easily see my hubby and I eating out more just because I’ll be lazier and I HATE cleaning up the kitchen every night!
Leslie says
I’m a scratch cooker (of course I am, I’m the kind of person that follows your blog ) and it takes SO LONG. I totally get people buying convenience things. Slicing all your own veg, making your own broth, blending your own seasoning mixes, making your own bread…. gosh. So. Much. Time.
Carrie says
I feel ya on this! I want to make everything from scratch but having a full time job outside the home doesn’t go well with that. I love making bread but only seem to do it when there is a rainy weekend. I do make chicken broth in the crock pot over night. I will cook a whole chicken in the crockpot, take off the meat, and then add water and scrapes of onions, carrots and celery back to the pot, cover with water and let it go 10 hours while I sleep. Put the crock in the fridge before work and stain the fat and bones and portion into freezer safe containers.
Lace Faerie says
My hubby and I are in our early 50s, making us the last of the Boomer’s. Neither of our families ever ate out. My Mama cooked from scratch and worked hard to feed 7 on a single income. Both she and her mother were registered nutritionalists (then called dieticians), so they valued fresh, minimally processed foods. My hubby’s Ma was an unpaid worker in the family business and mainly relied on box staples to have dinner on the table at 5:30p sharp. When we married the only “veggies” hubby would eat were potatoes and corn. I grew up on fresh or home frozen, if not home canned veggies of great variety.
Before we married, we actually talked about our different food backgrounds, and he promised to try whatever I cooked. Now a days, he’ll eat just about anything I put in front of him except for peas.
When our kids were young I was a sahm till our youngest was in 2nd grade. I raised rabbits for meat and cooked with ingredients not with boxes. I still cook from scratch and home can. The rabbits in the back yard are pets now, contributing greatly to the fertility of my raised beds veggie garden.
I hit the grocery store every two weeks, shop carefully at Costco for bulk ingredients and make my husband’s work lunch from planned dinner leftovers. I am really proud that my grown children have continued to value the frugality of homemade meals.
C lyons says
I have 3 children aged 12-31 and I worked outside the home 28 of those years.
Now, I have worked from home the last 3 years, so this is my take.
Getting home at 5:00 and after. Everyone is starving because let’s face it, lunch was 5-7 hours ago.
No. there will not be made from scratch cooked meals not this week. And not the weekend when I have no to do everything else I can not do in the 15 minutes of free time I may or may not have in the evening.
And even now that I work from home, although I do make a lot of fresh meals. A lot. It is a big time hog and we are all starving by the time it is served.
JC says
I definitely eat out more than I did growing up, but that’s easy to do when eating out simply was not an option. However, I am often lauded by my other millennial friends as being the only one who knows how to cook. I try to teach them when they ask, but they are just not interested.
I honestly think that its a combination of many of them think cooking is beneath them and that they don’t have time. Kitchen work has been advertised as drudgery for generations, so it makes sense that people would start to avoid it.
I really think home ec. classes should come back and teach kids how to make a stir fry. All I learned in Home ec was how to bake bread and cookies, which doesnt address the issue of not knowing how to get dinner on the table.
Deborah says
Being Bsby Boomers, We eat the majority of our meals at home, but we do go out to eat once a week, most weeks. It is our entertainment. Hubby and I take turns cooking. There are three of us, with his Mom living with us. When we go eat, that is when we can get her out of the house. And she eats more when we go out. She has been losing weight.
I prefer home cooked meals like I grew up eating.
Carrie says
I’m 30 and my parents were too busy to cook from scratch dinners for me and my 2 brothers when we were growing up. We ate hamburger helper or other boxed dinners, frozen lasagna, ham sandwiches or McDonalds most nights. I started to teach myself to cook in high school and college. I go to the grocery 1-2 times a week. I spend $400 a month for 2 adults to eat whole food items. I shop at Aldi or Walmart since they have the cheapest groceries and I have a small garden. I need ideas to save money on food. I won’t sacrifice quality though.
Savanna says
I think we’ll see more services like order online drive thru pick up services at our local grocery shops. I use the Fred Meyer one click quite often. As a mother of five this is just utterly amazing.. I sit at home and prepare a menu and order what we need and only what we need. Between this, zaycon, the neighbors cow in our freezer, Amazon and Costco(a once a month endeavor) we usually are set! I find my biggest money saver is to just stay out of the store and stay home and bake something!
Ellen in Clackamas says
My Mom grew up during the Depression with 8 brothers and sisters and they had to scramble to put food on the table for all of them so when the convenience foods came out she embraced them whole-heartedly!! Hello Hamburger Helper, TV dinners, canned stew, canned chili. She worked full-time but we had a small farm and garden so there were some fresh things, but she loved the boxes and bags and envelopes! Instant potatoes, instant gravy, etc. I never had real sour cream until I moved out and started cooking for myself—did you know you could buy powdered sour cream mix??? UGH. I am a Baby Boomer/ Empty Nester now but cook more from scratch than I have my whole life. Love my little garden and going to the farmers market to get food to make just for me!!
Margery says
I have a 25 year old son that eats out every day except Wednesday when his roommates all get together to cook and enjoy a meal together and he orders a pizza to eat for the weekend. I always get a phone call on that day on how to make something. But he is on the road 4 days of the week and works 10 hours plus days. My 23 daughter also works 10 hours plus days and two jobs but she cooks on her day off and freezes food for the busy days, she even asked for food store gift cards for Christmas.
My 18 and 20 year old live on college campus so they eat there, but the 20 year old has been our pizza maker since he was 12 so he still does that at home for us. The 18 year old lives in housing with 50 guys and each day 2 guys make dinner and lunch for all of them, my son is the pot washer 2x a week, and feeds himself on the weekends from the leftovers.
I cook almost every night, but had some issues going from cooking for 9 people to 4. Since my pizza making skills are awful we do pick up a ready to bake pizza on the Fridays the pizza cook son is not home. What I have fallen in love with is Walmart order on line and they load it in my car great for soccer season. Also we have a local market that offers home delivery free if you spend a 100 dollars and they carry it up the stairs to the kitchen, great for busy seasons at work and the week I stock up on pasta sauce, and canned tomatoes. I do keep some junk/ convince food handy because as much as i can make stuff from scratch there are days when I need a kid to just follow the directions on a box. Cheaper then eating out.
AlysonRR says
We eat out (or take-out) about every other week, and have prepared food from the grocery store about once a week (battered chicken and fries, sushi from the fabulous deli at the grocery store in our rural area! They do freshly made rolls that are very tasty).
Otherwise it’s all home cooking. I have three teenage boys, ages 18, 17, and 14, and they each have a growing repertoire of meals they can cook, so I get a break about once a week or so, but otherwise it’s all me, since my husband works in another state most of the time.
I’m always happy to hear compliments from my sons’ friends about the food at our house, but my youngest recently heard more specific reasons from a couple friends: “You’ll love the food at his place – his mom actually cooks!” and “What I like is it’s always something I haven’t tried before. Like last time, we had this pasta thing and man, was it good!”.
My youngest said he’s heard the “his mom actually cooks” from several people. I asked what they ate, and son told me it was usually something from a box or the freezer.
I’m in my 50s – his friends’ parents are mostly 10-15yr younger – I’m not sure if that made a difference.
My foster son said he’d lost weight since coming to live with us in September. I asked if he was getting enough food, and he said “yes, but it’s so much more healthy!”. Apparently, he had been eating mostly peanut butter and chicken nuggets for the last few years 🙁
I wish school cafeterias could grow, buy, and serve more healthy options. I hate that kids are growing up without knowing how good fresh food tastes.