Value for money is growing in importance as families continue to eat meals inside the home during the ongoing lockdown period, according to new data from HIM and MCA Insight.
Value for money is growing in importance as families continue to eat meals inside the home during the ongoing lockdown period, according to new data from HIM and MCA Insight.
The company’s Channel Pulse data covering the week beginning 18 May 2020 says price as a consumer “need” has grown in importance for lunch (+4 percentage points), dinner (+3pp) and snack (+11pp) occasions, as coronavirus puts a squeeze on household incomes. Price is the second most important need across all meal occasions.
Purchasing through grocery stores has grown its share at mealtimes, most notably at dinner (+6.5pp), but also at breakfast (+1.5pp) and snack (+0.3pp), while purchasing through restaurant and takeaway delivery has fallen, suggesting that cooking meals from scratch in the home is still increasing in frequency.
The latest Channel Pulse also shows that the grocery delivered channel increased its share of occasions at breakfast (+2.1%), lunch (+0.3%) and snack (+0.2%), and HIM/MCA believes that online grocery services will remain in high demand even when lockdown ends and the UK moves into ‘adjusted normality’.
Blonnie Walsh, head of insight at HIM & MCA Insight said: “With lockdown measures starting to ease and shoppers given more freedom on how much time they spend outside of their homes, we have seen an increase in the use of the grocery in-store channel.
“However, this increase is at the expense of out-of-home delivered, which saw declines across all dayparts. Grocery delivered continues to perform strongly, with those most vulnerable still advised to shield, but also those not necessarily shielding have settled into a routine of using delivery services. As reported in our UK Recovery Report, we expect demand for grocery delivery to remain for some time after lockdown ends.”
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