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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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MIT Research Opens Up Potential of Lab-Grown Plants

By now Spoon readers are most likely familiar with the idea of lab-grown meat. After all, there are a number of companies around the world tackling the issue. But lab-grown plants? That’s something we haven’t heard as much about. However, it’s an idea that got a little boost this week, thanks to new research from MIT (hat tip: TechCrunch).

MIT News reports today that researchers at that university grew wood-like plant structures in a lab from cells extracted from Zinnia leaves. The process is akin to the way meat is grown in a lab: starter plant cells were placed in a growth medium, and then engineers added different hormones and compounds to “tune” the final structure created.

While still very early on, the results from MIT and continued research could have a potential impact on agriculture and the way food is produced. Just as lab-grown meat looks to create actual meat without the environmental strains of raising animals, lab-grown plants could be raised anywhere at anytime, and require less land and fewer inputs.

This new research is actually coming out at a fortuitous time in the agriculture industry. Indoor farms, or controlled ag facilities, are popping up across the country, changing the way our produce is grown. For instance, the first tomatoes grown in AppHarvest’s 60-acre indoor farm in Kentucky hit store shelves this week. The facility is projected to grow 45 million pounds of tomatoes every year.

What if, instead of just controlling the growing conditions of a plant, they could also control the “manufacturing” of the plant as well, reducing the growth time, or developing different nutritional strains on the cellular level. Those controlled ag companies could truly “control” the entire process of growing food from the ground up.

That is still a ways off, but as we’ve seen with cultured meat, innovation in lab-grown food happens quickly.

From the Lab: This Smart Fabric Can Identify Foods You Place on It

Researchers at Dartmouth College, Wuhan University, Southeast University, and Microsoft Research have developed a fabric that can identify what foods and other types of objects placed on it (hat tip to Engadget).

Dubbed Capacitivo, the technology attaches a grid of electrodes to a textile. By applying an electric field to the fabric and some machine learning, objects placed on it can be identified by measuring any shift in capacitance.

The technology can detect different types of food, even when those items are inside containers like water glasses and bowls. According to the paper, the tech also has an average accuracy of 90.71 percent.

You might be thinking, “Why would I need my tablecloth to tell me what’s on it, I can see whatever I put on it.” Well, according to the paper, the readings from the fabric could be integrated with other kitchen and cooking apps. For example, you could place a bunch of fruits on a table and based on that have a smoothie recipe suggested to you. When you eat dinner, your meal could automatically be uploaded to a diet tracking app. Or when making a meal, it could provide some form of guided cooking by telling you which ingredients to add and when.

Capacitivo: Contact-Based Object Recognition on Interactive Fabrics using Capacitive Sensing

The technology isn’t perfect. It has a hard time with metallic objects, and researchers said it isn’t very good at identifying specific liquids (e.g. distinguishing a beer from a Coke). But, this is a fist step that it still very much in the lab. With a little imagination, it’s not hard to see how a smart surface like this could be integrated to talk with your appliances to create an even more connected kitchen.

As Menus Move to Mobile Phones, Research Shows AR Could Drive More Sales

Among the countless ways COVID is altering the meal journey is the humble menu. Gone are the germy, reusable laminated menus of the past, and while single-use paper menus are a cheap stopgap, the whole experience will move to our mobile phones.

There’s a problem with ordering through mobile menus, though: they aren’t very enticing. Unless you’re familiar with the restaurant you’re ordering from, you’re scrolling and swiping through a lengthy list of tiny 2D thumbnail images to find what you want.

But new research out of Oxford University shows that augmented reality (AR) could be the way to create appetizing menus on your mobile phone. Oxford’s study, conducted in Oxford, England last year in partnership with the AR company Qreal, a subsidiary of The Glimpse Group, gave some participants traditional menus and others AR-capable menus that presented the virtual food as it would look right in front of them on the table.

Highlights from the study, which were emailed to The Spoon, found that “Participants were significantly more likely to order a dessert if they viewed options in the AR menu (41.2%) versus the control menu (18%).” This was across age groups and sexes, as well as across familiarity with AR, so it wasn’t just tech-savvy folk indulging in a shiny new toy.

Not only that, but participants in the study using the AR menu also “spent significantly more on dessert than those in the control condition, $2.93 versus $1.38 (increase of 112%)”

As Mike Cadoux, General Manager of Qreal, summed it up with me over the phone last week, the addition of AR plays into the old adage that you “eat with your eyes first.”

“It’s like a test drive for a car,” said Cadoux, “Same way when you buy food, you want to think about what it’s like to eat it.”

If the results of this study had been released even six months ago, it probably would have been viewed as more of an interesting idea. A nice-to-have kind of thing, but definitely a can kicked down the road in favor of something more pressing.

The coronavirus, however, could accelerate AR’s adoption in the restaurant industry. First, as noted, even if you can (legally and emotionally) to sit and dine in a restaurant, the menu is moving towards mobile, so restaurants need to rethink their digital strategy and how they present their food to customers to begin with.

But more pressing is the fact that the restaurant business was already moving towards off-premises eating before the pandemic and now relies on delivery and takeout to stay alive. This, in turn means that more people will be selecting their meals from the comfort of their couch via mobile phone.

“Instead of a thumbnail of a picture,” Cadoux said, “You can view it in 3D and move it to an AR experience.” AR gives customers a better sense of what the food will look like, from all angles, when it’s on their own plates on and tables.

In addition to restaurants, third-party delivery services, with their marketplaces and massive audiences, should also be looking closely at providing an AR option.

There are the economics of a shift to an AR menu for any restaurant of delivery service to consider. But thanks to Apple and Google, AR technology is easier than ever to implement. And while the Oxford study doesn’t prove outright that implementing AR menus will guarantee increased sales, the study is a nice data point that seems to indicate it’s worth at least experimenting with it.

Researchers Develop Coating to Prevent the Spread of Foodborne Illnesses on Surfaces

One of the reasons I’ve reduced my meat consumption lately is hygiene. Opening, preparing or handling raw chicken or pork sends me on a frantic tizzy of spraying down every surface in my kitchen with Lysol.

New research findings out of the University of Missouri this month could eventually ensure that some of the surfaces in my kitchen are built to help prevent the spread of foodborne pathogens like E. coli and salmonella.

The study was conducted by Eduardo Torres Dominguez, a chemical engineering doctoral student, with guidance from Professors Heather K. Hunt and Azlin Mustapha. Together they developed a coating made from titanium dioxide, which, when applied to stainless steel and exposed to UV light, is highly effective at killing organisms like bacteria (more than UV light on a regular stainless steel surface). Given that, places like food processing facilities and commercial kitchens could use countertops, cutting boards and even knives made from this coated stainless steel to help deter the spread of harmful bacteria.

This is especially true for the overall sanitary conditions of surfaces found in food processing and preparation facilities. A counter might not get cleaned properly every time on every square inch of its surface, allowing a pathogenic biofilm to form. Having a surface with this titanium oxide coating could help create an overall less hospitable place for bacteria to multiply.

The results of this research are still very early on, and while the material has survived an autoclave, it hasn’t gone through rigorous testing over a prolonged period of time, and there are still questions to answer. For example, researchers don’t know yet how long the coating would last when scrubbed every day for year.

“It’s incredibly stable material,” Prof. Hunt told me by phone last week, “It’s Chemically and thermally stable,” so it won’t break down if you use bleach on it or heat it.

“Titanium dioxide is a food grade material,” Prof. Mustapha said. That way, even if the coating came off, it wouldn’t be harmful if ingested the way something like silver is.

With the COVID-19 pandemic raging across the world, there is a renewed emphasis on sanitation and hygiene, especially as it relates to our food. This research from the Univ. of Missouri comes just months after PathSpot raised $6.5 million for its device that helps ensure food workers have washed their hands properly and removed pathogenic material.

Researchers still have a lot of work ahead of them before they are able to make any kind of leap from the lab to commercial applications, let alone consumer ones. But I, for one, am looking down the line and towards the day when (hopefully) my cutting boards can do some of the work in staying clean.

Robot Learns to Cook Omelets to Your Liking

Whether it’s burgers, tater tots or fried octopus balls, there are plenty of things robots can cook, and plenty of robots out there trying. But those robots are pretty rigid, following a specific set of criteria. The whole point is that they take over the repetitive task of cooking the same thing over and over and prepare it consistently.

But researchers at the University of Cambridge released a paper this week showing how they are teaching a robot to not just make an egg omelet for you, but also learn from how you like your eggs and adjust the cooking accordingly.

Improving robotic cooking using Batch Bayesian Optimization

IEE Spectrum has the full story (and an interview with the paper’s authors), and explains how the robot is able to do this customized cooking:

The researchers employed a solution to this problem called batch Bayesian optimization. The more traditional sequential Bayesian optimization would take a human’s score of each omelet and use it to modify the cooking process for the next omelet, but this approach doesn’t work well because the human feedback is, as the researchers tell us, “often ambiguous and relative.” By running the optimization process only after all scores have been collected, the robot is able to explore many more combinations of variables, yielding a substantially better end result. Instead of the omelets gradually getting better as you go, you’ll instead be tasting them randomly, but you’ll end up with a much tastier omelet.

In this case, the robot is able to adjust a number of different variables such as the amount of salt/pepper, whisking time and cook time.

Adding this type of customization to a robot’s repertoire and being able to apply it to more kinds of food could help automated cooking move from the more mass, industrial-sized food prep of fast food and more into personal cooking. Having your own robo-chef that can cook eggs just as you like them while you get ready in the morning (or have dinner waiting for you when you get home), is an idea that would be welcome in a lot of homes.

Gallup: Curbside Pickup and Restaurant Takeout Show Double Digit Growth During Pandemic

A new survey from Gallup released today shows that more Americans have adopted low-contact methods of getting their food since the COVID-19 pandemic began. The survey found that 44 percent of U.S. adults picked up takeout from a restaurant in May (up from 26 percent at the end of March), and 36 percent used curbside pickup from a store (up from 19 percent in March).

While your first reaction to this news might be “Duh, we were on lockdown,” you’re not wrong. I mean, restaurants across the country had to close their dine-in service, so the only options were takeout and delivery. The Gallup survey is worth pointing out because data is better than anecdotes, and this study adds to a growing body of market research around our pandemic behaviors.

And sure, stats on increased restaurant takeout might not be too surprising, and the growth for curbside pickup is and will something to keep an eye on. Almost double the number of people are doing curbside pickup now since the beginning of the pandemic. And while Gallup’s poll only breaks out curbside pickup “at a store,” and not specifically a grocery store, the survey’s findings are in-line with other recent research on the growth of online grocery shopping.

A Brick Meets Click survey from earlier this month reported that online grocery sales hit $5.3 billion in April, with 40 million people shopping for groceries online. A Coresight survey also from this month predicted that online grocery shopping will grow by 40 percent this year to hit $30 billion in food and beverage sales.

While takeout and pickup have seen big increases over the past couple of months, delivery hasn’t seen a similar spike. According to that same Gallup survey, 23 percent of respondents had food or pizza delivered from a restaurant in May (up from 13 percent in March), and 14 percent had groceries delivered (up from 11 percent in March).

The bigger question looming over all of this data, of course, is how many of these behaviors will become permanent. As states around the country start to relax their shelter in place orders, we’ll have to see if people revert to the pre-pandemic patterns or have adopted totally new ones.

Meet Spoon Plus, Our New Deep Dive Insights & Virtual Events Membership Program

When we launched the Smart Kitchen Summit in 2015, an event all about the rethinking of cooking and our kitchens, we soon realized innovation was happening everywhere across the food system: at the farm, in our favorite restaurants, at the corner grocery store and, yes, in our kitchens.

It felt necessary, almost urgent, to tell these stories. After all, I’d spent a good chunk of the decade prior working for one of Silicon Valley’s biggest tech blogs, where I discovered how crucial it is to nascent markets to find those betting big on turning their world-changing ideas into a changed world. Back then it was technologies like cloud computing and IoT upending established industries like digital media and communication, but it didn’t take me long to realize the reinvention of the food system would be an even bigger deal.

After all, everyone eats, right?

So we started The Spoon in 2016 because we had this idea that we would tell the stories of a new generation of innovators working to reinvent the food system. Now, almost four thousand stories later, we are more convinced than ever about the impact of innovation on food.

Which is why we created Spoon Plus.

What’s Spoon Plus? In short, it’s our paid membership community where we’ll be bringing you deep dive insights in the form of research reports, long-form conversations with innovators, and exclusive online events to help you better understand the world of food tech and food innovation.

We’ll have new content every week, and to start we’ve got a great report from our own Catherine Lamb analyzing the emerging market for air protein. We also have a new report by me analyzing the survey results of food-industry executives about the impact of COVID-19 and their go-forward plans for the rest of 2020.

That’s not all. Early next week, I’ll publish my first weekly intelligence brief looking at COVID-19 disruption on new product launches in the kitchen and housewares space. After that, our editor-in-chief Chris Albrecht will soon have a report on the emerging market for next-generation food vending machines, and our restaurant tech expert, Jenn Marston, will have a strategy guide for cloud kitchens in the post-COVID world.

As part of Spoon Plus, we’ll also have deep dive conversations and interviews with industry executives like this one with Chris Young, the coauthor of Modernist Cuisine and founder of ChefSteps, who opened up to me recently about what happened with the company he founded and where he thinks the next big opportunities are in the world of food.

As part of our launch of Spoon Plus, we’re also announcing that Smart Kitchen Summit 2020 is going virtual, and that every Spoon Plus annual membership will include a ticket to SKS 2020. Our belief is that our events and online content have a symbiotic relationship, where our community engages with the same innovators we are writing about and where we often find the next big story at The Spoon. As we go deeper with Spoon Plus, we want our SKS community to be a part of that.

Of course, part of the reason for going virtual with our flagship event is we now live in a world where in-person events that thrive on a global mix of interesting people are going to be difficult, if not impossible, for the next 1-2 years. That said, we’re really excited about the SKS reaching even more people. We’ve been working hard at building our virtual event capabilities (we had a virtual COVID-19 food summit last month with over 1500 attendees), and are becoming more excited by the day about the possibilities of SKS 2020 and other exclusive virtual events through Spoon Plus.

So if you want to go deeper with us through research and reports, if you want to attend SKS 2020, if you want to support The Spoon as we grow, subscribe to Spoon Plus. As a way to help you get started, we’re offering Spoon Plus annual memberships for 40% off for the next ten days only. This one-time discount includes our company plans (that’s right – you can get Spoon Plus for your entire team). Just use the discount code LAUNCH when you are checking out and Memberful (the technology powering our membership offering) will deduct the amount from the total.

And of course, if you want to try out Spoon Plus for a month, you can subscribe to our monthly plan (monthly plans do not include a ticket to SKS). We also offer substantial discounts for students and for anyone who is in the midst of job transition.

If you’d like to learn more about those, just drop us an line.

For those of you wondering about The Spoon’s free coverage, don’t worry. We’re more committed than ever to bringing you the same daily news and analysis of those changing the food system for free on our main site. Spoon Plus is for those who, like us, also want to go deeper and access content that connects the dots from our daily reporting.

Thanks for your support. We look forward to building Spoon Plus together as we look to better understand and engage in the future of food.

Survey: Spurred by COVID-19, Online Grocery to Grow by 40 Percent in 2020, Hit $38B in Sales

It seems obvious that mandated sheltering in place because of a global pandemic has been a big driver of online grocery sales. But thanks to a new survey from Coresight Research, we now have some numbers to back that obvious assertion up, and show how big grocery e-commerce is getting.

In its US Online Grocery Survey 2020 (subscription required), Coresight predicted that the online grocery sector will grow by roughly 40 percent this year. The report states “That would equate to almost $38 billion of online food and beverage sales in 2020, or around 3.5% of the total market.” That’s up from 2.6 percent in 2019.

As you can probably guess, the coronavirus has spurred this surge in e-commerce. Coresight’s survey found that 49 percent of respondents said they started buying or were buying more groceries online because of the outbreak. It should be noted that this survey was conducted in mid-March, relatively early on in the mandated shelter in place orders. Those numbers may have actually gone up in April as the virus continued to spread.

In addition to more people buying groceries online, people are buying more types of items (produce, meat, alcohol) online. Coresight found that people are buying across an average of five different grocery categories online, up from 4.4 categories last year. Coresight says this indicates people aren’t just buying one-offs, but doing full-basket shopping online.

And finally, it looks as though demand for online commerce could remain strong over the next year. Coresight found that while 52 percent of respondents said that they had bought online groceries in the past 12 months, 62.5 percent expect to do so in the next twelve months.

Coresight’s numbers add to a growing body of market research that illustrate just how online grocery shopping has accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this month, Brick Meets Click reported that grocery e-commerce sales hit $5.3 billion in April. NPD Group found that third-party grocery delivery sales jumped nearly 300 percent in April alone. And last month, a C+R Research study found that 60 percent of US shoppers were “fearful” of physically going into the grocery store.

Grocery stores have been considered essential since the start of this pandemic, so they have remained open the entire time (thank you, grocery store workers!). But even though some states are relaxing their stay at home restrictions, grocery stores are implementing new measures to help curb the spread of the virus. Going forward, grocery shopping isn’t going to be what it was just a few months ago. Plexiglass shields at checkout, fewer people in the stores, masks worn by employees and customers. The in-store experience may just make shopping at home online more attractive.

Technomic Survey: Three in Ten Consumers to Eat Out Less Amid COVID-19 Fears

Even as the outbreak of coronavirus/COVID-19 continues to evolve and grow, we still don’t have a clear idea of exactly how much it will fundamentally change our entrenched, traditional behaviors. Are handshakes a thing of the past? Is working from home the new normal? Will we travel less for both work and fun?

While we can only wait to discover the answers to those bigger questions, a whitepaper from Technomic this week outlines some of the more immediate ways COVID-19 is impacting consumer behavior as it relates to how we get our food.

Technomic surveyed 1,000 consumers between Feb. 28 and March 2 and found “more than three in 10 consumers say they plan on leaving the house less often, not go to restaurants as often or not order food or beverages at away-from-home venues as often.” Additionally, of those refraining to eat out, “31 percent say that decreased frequency will last for between one and three months.”

Image via Technomic.

This isn’t great news for full-service restaurants, which are already having to work harder to attract foot traffic as off-premises grows more and more popular.

You might think this decrease in on-premise eating would translate into a wave of delivery orders from restaurants, but Technomic found that of people eating out less, only 13 percent think they will order more restaurant delivery because of the outbreak.

Technomic is quick to point out that there are still a lot of unknowns when it comes to the virus’ spread, so it’s too soon to tell exactly what its full impact will be. However, the survey does point out a couple of areas where the food industry could face the biggest impacts.

On the negative side, as alluded to earlier, Technomic says on-premise dining at restaurants could face the biggest downturn as people hole up at home and avoid crowds.

And while it’s weird to think of an “upside” to a global pandemic, Technomic rightly points that that if people do refrain from sitting in a restaurant to eat, drive-thrus and delivery restaurants (think: pizza) could become more popular.

Additionally, supermarkets, which have already seen a surge in panic shopping, could also see their foodservice items benefit as people grab meals while grocery shopping.

And while they don’t mention it specifically, an increase in food delivery could bring with it a boom in ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants as restaurant brands look to pare down their physical footprint and infrastructure costs.

We’ve been chronicling how COVID-19’s spread is already altering how the food industry does business — whether it’s food conferences being canceled, reducing human-to-human contact with delivery, using robots to deliver food, or Kickstarter projects being delayed.

But when it comes to this outbreak, there’s not a whole lot we can do but wait (and wash our hands!). Technomic’s survey certainly won’t be the last word as this crisis evolves, but at least it provides some numbers to help businesses prepare.

Study: Online Grocery Sales to Hit $143 Billion by 2025

A newly released report from Nielsen and the Food Marketing Institute (FMI) saying that online sales of food and beverages will reach $143 billion by 2025 (hat tip to Grocery Dive). Nielsen and FMI also said that this $143 billion will represent 30 percent of all omnichannel food and beverage sales.

What’s notable about these new figures is how much online grocery shopping is accelerating. In 2017, Nielsen and FMI predicted that online grocery sales would hit $100 billion by 2025. The two firms then updated their figure last year to say online grocery shopping would hit $100 billion between 2022 and 2024.

This acceleration is due in part to the logistics and delivery infrastructures being put in place by retailers. Grocery Dive writes that according to Nielsen and FMI, things like Amazon auto replenishment, two-hour delivery and the widespread availability of buy online and pick up at stores are contributing to the boost in online sales.

We’ve written before about how grocery retailers are in a Field of Dreams scenario. All the major grocery chains are investing heavily in logistics and building out delivery infrastructure now for the online grocery shoppers to come. Amazon waived its delivery fee for Prime members. Walmart is rapidly rolling out its Delivery Unlimited program nationwide. Albertsons is building out micro-fulfillment centers. And Kroger is doing everything from robot-powered fulfillment warehouses to testing self-driving grocery delivery vehicles.

All this investment will (and is, evidently) moving more people towards buying groceries online.

And in what may come as a surprise, “the olds” are driving this adoption of online grocery shopping. Nielsen and FMI found that shoppers between the ages of 45 and 64 held the largest amount of omnichannel grocery spending. Gen Z shoppers still prefer to do their grocery shopping in-store.

I expect we will see continued acceleration in the space, especially as grocery stores expand the delivery of food to include things like deli and made to order meals.

Welp. Robots Have Knives Now, and Know How to Use Them (to Slice Onions)

Well, fellow humans, we had a good run, but our time is over. Robots have their knives out — literally — and know how to use them.

Terminator-esque teasing aside, IEEE Spectrum has a video roundup of some of cutting-edge (sorry) robotics research being done right now. Included among the videos is “Robotic Cutting: Mechanics and Control of Knife Motion,” by Xiaoqian Mu, Yuechuan Xue, and Yan-Bin Jia from Iowa State University, in Ames, Iowa, USA.

You may think that having a robot to slice an onion mainly entails a big mechanical arm slamming a knife down, but you’d be wrong. The researchers created a program that combines and coordinates pressing, pushing and slicing motions. From the research paper’s Introduction:

Cutting skills such as chop, slice, and dice are mostly beyond the reach of today’s robots. Technical challenges come not just from manipulation of soft and irregularly-shaped objects, but more from doing so while fracture is happening. The latter requires planning and force control based on reliable modeling of an object’s deformation and fracture as it is being cut. The knife’s movement needs to be adjusted to progress in terms of material fracture. Its trajectory may need to be replanned in the case of an unforeseeable situation (e.g., appearance of a bone).

Robotic Cutting: Mechanics and Control of Knife Motion

As you can see from the video, this particular robot won’t be wowing crowds at a Benihana anytime soon, but it shows once again that robots are getting more proficient at higher-skilled tasks. Automation is coming for food sector jobs, and while we think of them right now in terms of flipping burgers and bussing tables, robots will be automating more and more tasks in restaurants, like prepping vegetables.

Dishcraft, for example, is still pretty tight lipped around what it’s working on, but the company has talked about building robots to do specific tasks in restaurant kitchens like prep work. Miso Robotics’ Flippy was created in part to take over dangerous tasks like working the grill and deep fryer in the kitchen, and the company has already talked about Flippy eventually chopping vegetables.

While there are still many issues to work through with the rise of robots, having them handle knives in the kitchen (and saving countless fingertips from lacerations) is probably not such a bad thing.

NPD: Frozen Food Sales are Up (Thanks, Millennials!)

Just about this time last year we asked the question “Are We Entering a Frozen Food Renaissance?” because a wave of startups were transforming frozen foods from just bags of peas and TV dinners into something more high-end and healthy.

Looks like people are paying attention to this renaissance and ponying up for frozen food. According to a recent study from NPD, frozen foods were a part of “9.8 billion eating occasions in home, up 2 percent from a decade ago.” Two percent may not sound like much over ten years, but as NPD points out, that translates into billions of meals, and we would like to point out that can mean billions of dollars.

And in a welcome turn of events, frozen foods appear to be something millennials are not killing off, but rather, reviving. From the NPD press release:

“Demographic shifts, like Millennials moving into the busiest times of their lives juggling spouses, kids, and a career, are fueling a greater need for the convenience that frozen foods offer,” says David Portalatin, NPD Food Industry Advisor and author of Eating Patterns in America. “Manufacturers are also doing their part in increasing interest in frozen foods by innovating around contemporary food values and emerging flavor trends to provide convenience.”

We’ve seen that innovation in frozen food firsthand from companies like Mealhero, which ships pre-packaged frozen food and connected steam cooker to automatically prepare them. Buttermilk sends pre-made Indian food that can be frozen and reheated in the microwave. Daily Harvest goes after millennials directly with its delivery of frozen smoothies and bowls. And companies like Stouffers are creating entire frozen meal kits.

As NPD also points out, more than 80 percent of meals and eating happens in the home, and U.S. consumers are turning to things like frozen vegetables and chicken for cooking convenience at dinnertime. Breakfast is another growing category, thanks to things like frozen waffles and breakfast sandwiches.

With this growth, it looks like frozen food might be moving from a renaissance into a golden age.