Dining and shopping today is very different than in days gone by – the Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods is a result

“I used to drink it,” said Andy Warhol once of Campbell’s soup. “I used to have the same lunch every day, for 20 years, I guess, the same thing over and over again.” In Warhol’s signature medium, silkscreen, the artist reproduced his daily Campbell’s soup can over and over again, changing only the label graphic on each one.

When I was growing up I didn’t have exactly the same thing over and over like Andy Warhol, but virtually every dinner was at home, at our kitchen table (we had no dining room in the 4-room apartment). Eating out was a rare treat and my father would have been abhorred if my mom brought in prepared food. My mom, like most women of that era, didn’t officially work, but did do the bookkeeping for my dad’s plumbing business. She would shop for food almost every day at a local grocery and wheel it home in her shopping cart.

When my wife and I were raising our kids, the kitchen remained the most important room in the house. While we tended to eat out many weekend nights, our Sunday through Thursday dinners were consumed at home, but were sprinkled with occasional meals brought in from the outside like pizza, fried chicken, ribs, and Chinese food. Now, given a high proportion of households where both parents work, eating out, fast foods and prepared foods have become a large proportion of how Americans consume dinner. This trend has reached the point where some say having a traditional kitchen may disappear as people may cease cooking at all.

In this post, I discuss the evolution of our eating habits, and how they will continue to change. Clearly, the changes that have already occurred in shopping for food and eating habits were motivations for Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods.

The Range of How We Dine

Dining can be broken into multiple categories and families usually participate in all of them. First, almost 60% of dinners eaten at home are still prepared there. While the percentage has diminished, it is still the largest of the 4 categories for dinners. Second, many meals are now purchased from a third party but still consumed at home. Given the rise of delivery services and greater availability of pre-cooked meals at groceries, the category spans virtually every type of food. Thirdly, many meals are purchased from a fast food chain (about 25% of Americans eat some type of fast food every day¹) and about 20% of meals² are eaten in a car. Finally, a smaller percentage of meals are consumed at a restaurant. (Sources: ¹Schlosser, Eric. “Americans Are Obsessed with Fast Food: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal.” CBSNews. Accessed April 14, 2014 / ²Stanford University. “What’s for Dinner?” Multidisciplinary Teaching and Research at Stanford. Accessed April 14, 2014).

The shift to consuming food away from home has been a trend for the last 50 years as families began going from one worker to both spouses working. The proportion of spending on food consumed away from home has consistently increased from 1965-2014 – from 30% to 50%.

Source: Calculated by the Economic Research Service, USDA, from various data sets from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

With both spouses working, the time available to prepare food was dramatically reduced. Yet, shopping in a supermarket remained largely the same except for more availability of prepared meals. Now, changes that have already begun could make eating dinner at home more convenient than eating out with a cost comparable to a fast food chain.

Why Shopping for Food Will Change Dramatically over the Next 30 Years

Eating at home can be divided between:

1. Cooking from scratch using ingredients from general shopping
2. Buying prepared foods from a grocery
3. Cooking from scratch from recipes supplied with the associated ingredients (meal kits)
4. Ordering meals that have previously been prepared and only need to be heated up
5. Ordering meals from a restaurant that are picked up or delivered to your home
6. Ordering “fast food” type meals like pizza, ribs, chicken, etc. for pickup or delivery.

I am starting with the assumption that many people will still want to cook some proportion of their dinners (I may be romanticizing given how I grew up and how my wife and I raised our family). But, as cooking for yourself becomes an even smaller percentage of dinners, shopping for food in the traditional way will prove inefficient. Why buy a package of saffron or thyme or a bag of onions, only to see very little of it consumed before it is no longer usable? And why start cooking a meal, after shopping at a grocery, only to find you are missing an ingredient of the recipe? Instead, why not shop by the meal instead of shopping for many items that may or may not end up being used.

Shopping by the meal is the essential value proposition offered by Blue Apron, Plated, Hello Fresh, Chef’d and others. Each sends you recipes and all the ingredients to prepare a meal. There is little food waste involved (although packaging is another story). If the meal preparation requires one onion, that is what is included, if it requires a pinch of saffron, then only a pinch is sent. When preparing one of these meals you never find yourself missing an ingredient. It takes a lot of the stress and the food waste out of the meal preparation process. But most such plans, in trying to keep the cost per meal to under $10, have very limited choices each week (all in a similar lower cost price range) and require committing to multiple meals per week. Chef’d, one of the exceptions to this, allows the user to choose individual meals or to purchase a weekly subscription. They also offer over 600 options to choose from while a service like Blue Apron asks the subscriber to select 3 out of 6 choices each week.

My second assumption is that the number of meals that are created from scratch in an average household will diminish each year (as it already has for the past 50 years). However, many people will want to have access to “preferred high quality” meals that can be warmed up and eaten, especially in two-worker households. This will be easier and faster (but perhaps less gratifying) than preparing a recipe provided by a food supplier (along with all the ingredients). I am talking about going beyond the pre-cooked items in your average grocery. There are currently sources of such meals arising as delivery services partner with restaurants to provide meals delivered to your doorstep. But this type of service tends to be relatively expensive on a per meal basis.

I expect new services to arise (we’ve already seen a few) that offer meals that are less expensive prepared by “home chefs” or caterers and ordered through a marketplace (this is category 4 in my list). The marketplace will recruit the chefs, supply them with packaging, take orders, deliver to the end customers, and collect the money. Since the food won’t be from a restaurant, with all the associated overhead, prices can be lower. Providing such a service will be a source of income for people who prefer to work at home. Like drivers for Uber and Lyft, there should be a large pool of available suppliers who want to work in this manner. It will be very important for the marketplaces offering such service to curate to ensure that the quality and food safety standards of the product are guaranteed. The availability of good quality, moderately priced prepared meals of one’s choice delivered to the home may begin shifting more consumption back to the home, or at a minimum, slow the shift towards eating dinners away from home.

Where will Amazon be in the Equation?

In the past, I predicted that Amazon would create physical stores, but their recent acquisition of Whole Foods goes far beyond anything I forecast by providing them with an immediate, vast network of physical grocery stores. It does make a lot of sense, as I expect omnichannel marketing to be the future of retail.  My reasoning is simple: on the one hand, online commerce will always be some minority of retail (it currently is hovering around 10% of total retail sales); on the other hand, physical retail will continue to lose share of the total market to online for years to come, and we’ll see little difference between e-commerce and physical commerce players.  To be competitive, major players will have to be both, and deliver a seamless experience to the consumer.

Acquiring Whole Foods can make Amazon the runaway leader in categories 1 and 2, buying ingredients and/or prepared foods to be delivered to your home.  Amazon Fresh already supplies many people with products that are sourced from grocery stores, whether they be general food ingredients or traditional prepared foods supplied by a grocery. They also have numerous meal kits that they offer, and we expect (and are already seeing indications) that Amazon will follow the Whole Foods acquisition by increasing its focus on “meal kits” as it attempts to dominate this rising category (3 in our table).

One could argue that Whole Foods is already a significant player in category 4 (ordering meals that are prepared, and only need to be heated up), believing that category 4 is the same as category 2 (buying prepared meals from a grocery). But it is not. What we envision in the future is the ability to have individuals (who will all be referred to as “Home Chefs” or something like that) create brands and cook foods of every genre, price, etc. Customers will be able to order a set of meals completely to their taste from a local home chef. The logical combatants to control this market will be players like Uber and Lyft, guys like Amazon and Google, existing recipe sites like Blue Apron…and new startups we’ve never heard of.