Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

millennials

When It Comes to Cooking Videos, Gen Zers Love TikTok, Millennials Embrace YouTube

As a former industry analyst, I’m a sucker for survey research exploring how we cook, eat, and shop for food. Luckily for me, word of a new research study landed in my inbox this morning from (of all places) Home Run Inn Pizza. Okay, so not exactly Nielsen, but the study used a good sample size (2,000 US respondents) and had a mix of gender and regional representation. In other words, it seemed to be designed well enough to elicit decent results.

The survey focused on food behavior by Gen Z and Millennials. I’d seen studies like this before – heck, we’ve even conducted them here at The Spoon – but what stood out to me about this one was just how vital the dominant video platforms are nowadays when it comes to gaining cooking inspiration. According to the survey, 71% of Gen Z (between ages 9 and 24) and 67% of Millennials watch cooking videos but differ substantially in what platforms they watch the videos on.

Source: Home Run Inn

According to the study, Gen Zers are more than twice as likely (38% compared to 16% of Millennials) to watch cooking videos on TikTok. A more significant percentage of both groups said they watch cooking videos on YouTube, but Millennials usage far outpaced Gen Z respondents (66% of Millennials compared to 47% for Gen Z). Instagram usage was surprisingly low, with only 7% of Millennials and 4% of Gen Z saying they watch cooking videos on the platform. Neither Millennials (9%) nor Gen Z (3%) watched much traditional TV when watching cooking videos. According to the survey, both generations – 56% of Gen Z and 29% of Millennials – use TikTok for recipe discovery and learning cooking techniques.

Source: Home Run Inn

Another surprising data set was the kitchen gear each used to cook food. According to the survey, both generations rely most heavily on the stovetop, with two-thirds of Gen Z and Millennials saying that was their primary appliance. Interestingly, only 10% of Gen Z and 8% of Millennials said air fryers were their go-to, and an even smaller percentage – 6% for Gen Z and 4% for Millennials – said the microwave oven was their primary cooking appliance. For some reason, the survey didn’t ask about pressure cookers, an oversight, in my opinion, despite the struggles of the pioneering Instant Pot.

Finally, a significant percentage of both generations can be scolded for being poor company when using technology while breaking bread with others. According to the survey, 81% of Gen Z admit they have stared at their phone while dining with others, compared to 60% of Millennials.

If you’d like to see the study’s full results, you can find it here.

Research Confirms: The Kitchen is Dying. Unless it’s not.

The Spoon was borne out of The Smart Kitchen Summit, our annual conference about the future of the kitchen. But analysts seem unclear as to what exactly the future of the kitchen is. Are millennials and delivery killing off the kitchen? Or is the kitchen staying put and evolving into something different?

These questions kicked off in earnest last month when investment firm UBS came out with a report titled “Is the Kitchen Dead?”, which posited that by the year 2030, delivery could replace most meals cooked at home. The people burying the knife in the back of the kitchen? Millennials (obvi). Well, not just millennials. Robots, delivery apps and virtual kitchens would all play their part in killing off the kitchen.

And if you look around today, it’s not hard to reach that same conclusion. Services like UberEats are growing rapidly. And startups like Kitchen United are launching commercial kitchens so restaurants can meet the demand for delivery.

Bolstering these trends are generational shifts. Millennials spend less on groceries and more on eating out, and they can’t identify a garlic press or roast a chicken. So, once again, millennials are ruining everything.

Or are they? Especially when it comes to the kitchen?

Our own research conducted by The Spoon last year showed that 47 percent of millennials cook at home 5 or more times per week. And a new Datassential report shows that millennials over index when it comes to the types of cooking tools used (juicers, sous vide wands, Instant Pots, etc.). So millennials use the kitchen, they just do so differently than other generations.

And thinking differently about the kitchen is what new research from the NPD Groups suggests we do (hat tip to Food Dive). David Portalatin, Vice President, Industry Advisor at NPD published a blog post yesterday titled “The American Kitchen is Alive and Thriving.” In it, Portalatin says that while restaurant spending was up in the year ending May 2018, actual visits to restaurants (which includes delivery) was flat over the same time period. He also says that restaurant meal prices are going up faster than the cost of a home cooked meal.

Portalatin goes on to write:

“In our daily research of U.S. consumers’ eating behaviors, we consistently show that four out of five meals are prepared at home, and although the relationship of in-home prepared meals versus those sourced away-from-home has been stable for a few years, we still prepare more meals at home than we did a decade ago.”

Portalatin predicts that what will happen is we will blend meals we make at home with ready-to-eat items we buy from outside the home. It’s easy to see how something like grocery-store bought meal kits fits nicely into this scenario. You’re basically buying all the ingredients to make a meal at home, just without so much of the work.

Already, grocery retailers are setting themselves up for such a blended future. Kroger purchased meal kit company Home Chef, and Albertsons owns Plated, while Walmart and Amazon (via Whole Foods) offer their own branded meal kits. This isn’t to say that meal kits will dominate every dinner, but they offer a flexible and convenient option for consumers looking to eat a complete meal at home without having to do a ton of work.

You can even see this on the hardware side as appliances like the June oven, or Tovala or the forthcoming Suvie or Brava ovens look to take over most of the work in making a meal. Right now those devices are expensive, but they will get cheaper, which will cause their own evolutionary pushes in the kitchen.

So in the end, is the kitchen dead, dying, atrophying, or is it just fine, thank you very much? The answer none and all of the above. The kitchen as older generations have known it is dying, but that’s not just because of delivery, it’s also because we have a wave of newer, safer, and more robust cooking tools like Instant Pots and Tovalas that are changing how we cook.

Will it die off completely? Unlikely. Where would people stand during a cocktail party? I kid, but more seriously, until you can teleport 3D printed foods directly into your home, there will always be hungry people in houses looking for reach-in-the-pantry-or-microwave levels of instant gratification. Not to mention people who just plain like to cook.

But the role of the kitchen is something we consider every day here at The Spoon. In fact we are planning the full rundown for our upcoming Smart Kitchen Summit: North America in October. You should get your tickets to see what experts from across the food tech industry will have to say on the subject.

If Cooking Utensils Were Game Controllers, Would Millennials Cook More?

We have a cooking crisis on our hands.

At least that’s if you believe those who suggest Millennials are not mastering basic physical world skills – like cooking – as they wile away the hours staring at screens.

While surveys, including our own, have shown that Millennials are in fact cooking, there’s no doubt they (and my fellow busy Gen-Xers) could benefit from mastering some basic cooking skills. Coming up with reasons for cooking skills education is easy – you can save money, impress friends, try new kinds of food – but perhaps the most convincing argument is there’s a growing body of research showing a correlation between cooking at home and better health outcomes over time.

So, if cooking is good for us and society at large, doesn’t it make sense to get young people cooking more? And if so, the question becomes how to do that?

One way is to bring cooking and food information to young people in a format they can appreciate. Buzzfeed and others racking up billions of views monthly by creating highly shareable content in the form of visually fun cooking videos. YouTube and Facebook are enabling the rise of independent content creators as well as food-focused multichannel networks like Tastemade which tap into a growing hunger for food-specific content.

Another idea is teaching kitchens, which have become fashionable in places like Japan. ABC Cooking School has 125 locations in Japan, and the primary customer for the schools are young Japanese women (9 out of 10 students are women) who want to learn basic cooking skills.

But as most of us in the tech world knows, maybe the most surefire way to create more engagement in an activity is to add a layer of gaming to it.

One way to do that is through gamification. Gamification is the concept of adding game dynamics to almost any online activity. Whether it’s in the form of virtual rewards for your bank or badges from that online class you’re taking, most of us have used some form of gamification, and now cooking apps like SideChef are using game dynamics to get consumers cooking.

Then there are actual video games created to increase interest in a given topic. There’s no shortage of basic video games that integrate some cooking concept, from Nintendo’s Cooking Mama series to Overcooked from Steam, but where these games fall short in that they don’t put cooking tools in your hands. While you may be chopping veggies insanely fast on Cooking Mama, this doesn’t directly translate since you can’t use a game controller to make dinner.

But what if we were to make game controllers out of actual cooking tools? In other words, what if the knives, spoons, spatulas, and pans we used to make dinner with became part of the video game itself?

I know it sounds crazy, but bear with me. If you look at other physical crafts like knitting, creators have already started to make the actual craft tool one in the same as the video game controller.

Take Loominary, an open source game where the video game controller is a tabletop loom. The game’s creators created a computer software game that takes inputs from RFID tags on the loom shuttles and then registers choices made by the user as they start weaving on the loom.

You can see Loominary in action below:

Loominary Prototype Demo

Loominary uses RFID tags embedded in loom shuttles, but there’s no reason cooking tools couldn’t also use other sensors much the way today’s smart footballs and basketballs pack in sensors like accelerometers to track performance, speed and technique. Add in things like machine vision – and there’s no shortage of efforts to layer machine vision with food – and you may have the makings of an interesting video game concept: making dinner.

Imagine being immersed in a video game where you are egged on by a virtual Top Chef panel of judges as you cook a meal. You can compete against yourself, someone in another city, or against a virtual Heston Blumenthal.

At the end of the game, you not only have a score, but you have a dinner to eat.

While the Tasty One Top isn’t a game platform, there’s no reason it couldn’t be. If the company mapped all those Tasty cooking videos to work with the cooktop, why couldn’t they eventually track behavior and even have competitions for the best rendition of Tasty meals made at home?

And who’s to say you couldn’t combine cooking with virtual reality experiences. I’m sure Apple has thought about how the iPhone X’s augmented reality could be applied in the kitchen.

So maybe cookware companies aren’t gaming companies. But, with increasing investment in software and sensors, the arrival of machine vision and augmented reality, I’m betting some companies will look to create a tasty combination of cooking and gaming to get millennials to put on the cooking apron.

Yes, Millennials Are Staying Home To Cook. Here’s What They’re Making

Last week, Buffalo Wild Wings CEO Sally Smith wrote a letter to investors to tell them that times are tough in the world of fast casual dining.

According to Smith, one of the big reasons for the struggles of Applebee’s and others in the world of fast dining is millennials are eschewing mountainous plates of fried fare to cook at home and use food delivery services like Blue Apron.

Here at the Spoon, we’re not surprised. According to a survey we conducted of over 1000 US households, we found that 95% of millennials (age group 18-29) cook weekly at home, compared with 92% of those aged 30-44 and 93% of those aged 45-59.

However, while a slightly higher percentage of millennials do cook at home, they do so less frequently than their older counterparts. According to our survey, 47% of millennials cook at home 5 or more times per week, compared with 55% of those aged 30-44 and 60% of those over 60.

When they aren’t cooking at home, millennials aren’t necessarily heading to their local Red Robin. That’s because as Smith notes, the younger generation has embraced home delivery more fully than their older peers.

As can be seen above, millennials are the biggest adopters of home delivery from restaurants. According to our survey, 36% of those under age 30 have food delivered from their local restaurant, compared with 34% of those aged 30-44 and just 19% of those over 60.  Those aged 30-44 are most likely to use meal kit services (10%), just slightly ahead of the 9% of those under 30 years of age who use meal kit services. Only 3% of those over 60 use meal kits delivery services, according to our survey.

When millennials do decide to cook at home, are they zapping frozen food in the microwave or trying to unleash their inner Bobby Flay with a more complicated multi-ingredient meal?

According to our survey, the most common typical meal (33%) is a simple one or two ingredient meals like burgers or spaghetti, while some choose to spend a couple of hours making a more complicated meal (26%).  It’s clear this isn’t the microwave dinner generation, with just 11% choosing a frozen or instant meal on a typical night.

So when they do cook at home, what type of equipment do use? Pretty much the same as everyone else. According to our survey, the under 30 crowd use stove tops, microwaves and ovens as their go-to cooking equipment for a typical meal, just as their older peers do. Millennials were more likely to use a toaster oven than other age groups, with one-third of respondents under 30 using the quick and convenient device once per week.

Not all hope is lost for restaurants hoping to get some wallet share of millennials. According to our survey, 47% of those aged under 30 still eat out at least once per week, and 21% eat out multiple times per week.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that restaurants don’t have lots of work today, especially when it comes to figuring out how to deal with the robots both in the front and back of house.

Make sure to subscribe to the Spoon newsletter to get it in your inbox. And don’t forget to check out Smart Kitchen Summit, the only event on the future of the food, cooking, and the kitchen. 

You’ll Be Surprised How Millennials Discover New Recipes

If you think Millennials only find recipes through Snapchat, Facebook or YouTube, think again. As it turns out, twenty somethings are actually more likely to ask Aunt Judie or mom for her casserole recipe than get it on social media.

As shown in a recent survey conducted of over one thousand households by NextMarket Insights and The Spoon, recipe discovery behavior of Millennials – as well as Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers – is surprisingly diverse. In fact, the number one source for recipes among twenty-somethings by a long-shot is friends and family at 63%, followed by social media (53%) and recipe sites (46%).

One technology savvy friend that is likely to provide more and more recipes in the future? Alexa. And as I wrote this morning, chances are are recipe sites like Allrecipes will be there to capitalize.

These Design Trends Will Help You Create a Winning Product (VIDEO)

So you’ve finally finished creating your connected kombucha maker! But there’s only one model, it feels pretty cheap, and the app interface is built into the side of the device. Hmmm. According to Carley Knobloch of HGTV Smart Home, consumers may not be so excited about your product.

At the 2016 Smart Kitchen Summit (watch the video below), Knobloch detailed the latest trends that can make a product stand out from the crowd.

“It should really be a sensory experience that tells our body in every way that we are home,” she said.

Personalization

First off, that means it should be unique to each person’s home. Consumers are looking for custom looks and features “so that everything looks as unique as the person,” Knobloch said. “The more you can accommodate different features and the ability to change features depending on every person’s or family’s needs, the better,” making the customer a partner in the design experience and that much more invested in your product.

This flexibility for the oh-so-precious millennials, who want an authentic space, as well as boomers, who are all about individualism. Two age groups, one stone.

Sensory Experience

Don’t stop at the visuals. Consider the sounds your product makes to create a happy Pavlovian response. Pay attention to touch, “the weight of it, does it feel substantial or does it feel flimsy; what’s the quality of the finishes, do they look polished do they look casual; is it fun to touch the touchscreen?” Knobloch asked.

She said that natural products are very en vogue at the moment: bamboo, plant life, woven baskets, pottery, macramé. Just as valuable: touchless faucets, induction burners, disappearing devices that can hide behind cabinets.

The Right Kind of Smart

Most of all, consider what kind of connectivity your consumers want. “They don’t want smart that isn’t future-proof,” she said, and “they don’t want smart that doesn’t respect their privacy.” On the other hand, they want smart that connects them with their food (think grocery shopping, meal prepping, and knowing what’s in their fridge) and smart that connects them to their family and the world.

Follow these guidelines and your connected kombucha maker might just become a hit.