As our busy lives nibble away at breakfast, lunch and dinner, marketers seize an opening to sell us meals of Go-gurt, Crisp' Ums, Soup at Hand and Snapple-a-Day.
By MARK ALBRIGHT
Published May 25, 2003
For Debra Kent Faulk, breakfast is a piece of toast eaten while driving the kids to school. A midmorning snack includes cereal. A fruit snack or cottage cheese will tide her over until a late business lunch in a restaurant. By late afternoon, she'll reach for some crackers while ferrying kids to and from activities or heading to volunteer work. Then it's time for a quick dinner.
"I eat six times a day and try to keep the portions small so I don't get hungry," said the owner of DKF Connects, a Tampa marketing services firm. "As far as dirtying dishes and eating big, regular meals - who has the time?"
These days, such eating habits have become the norm. America is becoming a nation of grazers, drifting from snack to meal to snack. People eat in their cars. Workers stock desk drawers with meal substitutes. Even restaurants staff up to serve a growing parade of between-meal gnoshers who arrive in midmorning or midafternoon.
Panera Bread, for instance, draws 30 percent of its business during what it calls "chill out" times of 9 to 11 a.m. and 2 to 5 p.m. The place might not look crowded. But it's a constant parade that is second in revenues only to lunch at the chain of 500 bakery-cafes.
"These days people eat at all times of the day," said Jon Jameson, chief brand officer for Panera Bread, which caters to the between-meal crowd with an array of light salads, minibundt cakes and muffins.
"The definition of a meal has changed," said Kim Feil, a division president at Information Resources Inc., a Chicago market research company. "Today people are snacking more throughout the day and considering it a substitute for a meal."
She compiled a report, "Meals Demise, Snackers Arise," that found the average American eats 4.3 times a day. People who claim to eat three square meals a day eat 4.9 times a day on average. Many eat six times a day.
That's exactly what Stacey Lindo of St. Petersburg does.
"I eat smaller portions more frequently so I'm never hungry," said the 23-year-old medical technologist, who stocks her desk with energy bars and fruit. "I try to stick with a protein, some carbs and a fruit or vegetable each time."
Americans have been snacking for decades, spooning ice cream or nibbling at chips while watching TV. But marketers began taking the grazing trend into new territory in the 1980s when fast-food chains such as McDonald's moved breakfast from the kitchen to the car.
The secret weapon was "portable foods" such as the Egg McMuffin and Burger King's development of a dripless syrup that made driving compatible with eating French toast sticks. Both products were made to be consumed in one hand while the other grips a steering wheel.
Today, about two-thirds of the breakfast business at McDonald's and Burger King goes out the drive-through window.
The "portable food" trend is roiling the $1-trillion packaged goods industry, which has invented an explosion of food products designed to be consumed on the run.
A key target audience: People who miss meals (17 percent skip at least one lunch a week and 13 percent miss a breakfast, according to a study done for Frito-Lay Inc.) and admit they don't eat a balanced diet (58 percent, Information Resources says).
Studies found consumers are willing to pay a premium for convenience foods. Price comes at the bottom of a long list of product attributes.
Grazing has extended snack food's reach into more corners of the supermarket. It's also made big breakfast players out of snack-food giants like Mars Inc. Chip and salsa-maker Frito-Lay bought Quaker Oats two years ago mainly to get into the portable breakfast business.
This summer Frito-Lay, a division of beverage giant Pepsico Inc., is introducing a Go-Snacks line. The 10 eat-on-the-go snacks range from Quaker Oats Oatmeal that comes in bars to Crisp' Ums. Those baked crisps are minigranola bars with banana nut flavoring.
"Everything in the line is made bite-sized so you can eat while driving," Quaker Oats spokesman Charles Nicholas said.
Once limited to natural food and health food stores, granola bars have morphed into energy bars, power bars and breakfast bars (often gaining lots of calories, fat and sugar in the process). The energy bar section of one Publix in St. Petersburg has grown from a few feet to a 12-foot-long section of the cereal aisle. The packaged dried fruits, nuts and trail mix section is just as big.
Snapple has introduced Snapple-a-Day, a ready-to-drink meal that offers 24 vitamins and minerals. The protein- and fiber-rich bottled drink comes in three tropical fruit flavors.
"So far Slim Fast is the only other product in this category," said Michael Sands, chief marketing and operations officer for Snapple Beverage Group in White Plains, N.Y., which has accelerated the pace of the nationwide rollout. "In test areas, sales have been overwhelming. We have marketed mainly through women's magazines, but yesterday I saw a bottle in a pickup truck cupholder at a construction site, so the word's getting out."
A lot of the effort is little more than new packaging. Cheetos and bite-size Ritz Bits (crackers with peanut butter) come in plastic hourglass-shape containers designed to look grabable and to fit a car cupholder. Go-gurt is yogurt packed into a squeezable, handheld tube, packaging that is being used for single-serve pudding, applesauce and even peanut butter. Kraft wraps a Lenders Bagel and a plastic knife with shelf-stable Philadelphia Cream Cheese that is made to last up to 5 hours without refrigeration.
New packaging is not as simple as it sounds. Campbell Soup Co. spent five years developing its new Soup at Hand line of portable soups.
First the company had to invent a plastic container with a thin Styrofoam cover so the microwaved soup didn't get too hot but stayed suitably warm for an hour. Because Americans are unfamiliar with sipping soup through a tiny hole in a cup lid, Campbell hired people to offer free samples in supermarkets.
"The big problem was getting pieces of chicken and other ingredients small enough to float and fit through the hole in the lid for every sip," said brand marketing manager Tracy Brala. "Otherwise they sink to the bottom."
This year Campbell, which charges 50 cents a can more for Soup at Hand than its old standby condensed variety, added seven flavors to the original four. After finally coming up with tiny pieces of pasta, Campbell offers chicken noodle.
"Only 2 percent of our soup was being eaten outside the home," Brala said. "Now it's 50 percent."
Some products are jazzed-up versions of existing offerings. MLO Nutrition Inc. of Fairfield, Calif., has sold soy powder through gyms and health foods stores for years. Two years ago, it converted the powder into GeniSoy chips, nuts and energy bars to capitalize on recent studies about the health benefits of soy. Annual sales tripled to more than $100-million after the company created eight flavors for grocery stores. They range from Soy Crisps in nacho cheese, hickory smoke and barbecue flavors to Soy Nut Trail Mix with M&Ms.
"We learned that people won't eat soy unless it tastes good," said Jake Field, brand manager for GeniSoy.
The company's new "go anywhere"' energy bar is called Extreme Crunch. It is touted as virtually impossible to melt, making it a popular choice for hiking, ski trips or backpacks.
Often portability requires extending the shelf life of perishable products.
Yosport, a shelf-stable yogurt made in Spain, is supposed to last at least six months. But the product has had trouble gaining a foothold in the United States.
"It's been a big seller among Europeans for years," said Gabriel Pascual, a vice president with its Coral Gables distributor. "But Americans still are reluctant to believe it lasts that long."
Diet and health fads are a big influence in convenience foods.
That's why Baxter International, a Canadian company that makes dialysis and blood transfusion supplies, chose to market Pulse Nutrition drinks. It is flavored water sold as a dietary supplement that looks more like a bottle of soda pop. The vitamin-laced drink is customized for men, women or people with heart disease.
"We infused the supplements in water because the average person today only drinks a third of the water a day that's recommended," said Judy Gerber, the clinical manager who oversaw Pulse's development.
The fresh fruits and vegetable industry has a tough time keeping up, but it's trying. "One of our biggest problems is kids think produce is boring. So we're trying to teach them to chose the salad bar over the candy bar," said Martin Ordman, president of marketing services for Dole Foods, which offers free coloring books in the produce aisle and distributes free lesson plans on nutrition to elementary school teachers.
Dole joined with public nutrition agencies to lobby for a pilot program that stocks fresh fruit kiosks in second-grade classrooms for between-meal snacking. Federal grants paid $6-million for the program in four Midwestern states.
The renewed popularity of the high protein, low carb Atkins diet made meat snack foods the fastest-growing category among snack foods over the past three years. In fact, 32 percent of consumers find meat snacks, such as luncheon meat and jerky, an acceptable substitute for dinner.
"It's an on-the-go food, low in fat and made from round steak," said Rod Rodriguez, a sales executive for beef jerky maker Links Snacks.
For the motorist, Link Snacks has shrunk its 4-ounce sausage to 1.6 ounces, about the size of an adult thumb. It's called Lil' Chub.
Not surprisingly, many nutritionists and public health advocates take a dim view of the grazing trend.
"It would be okay if people were eating the same number of calories they missed by eating smaller portions, but most people don't count calories," said Elaine Turner, a professor at the University of Florida School of Food Science and Nutrition. "Have you seen the size of some of these muffins at Starbucks? Does everybody realize a soft drink packs 200 calories?"
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called the growing girth of Americans a significant public health problem. The agency estimates 61 percent of adult Americans are overweight and a third are considered obese. They say 13 percent of children and adolescents are overweight, double the rate of the 1970s.
"People are eating all day because manufacturers have made these calorie-laden foods so available that people eat when they aren't hungry," said Margo Wootan, diet and nutrition director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington, D.C., consumer group.
Marketing experts say consumers share the blame, citing other reasons people are eating more often:
Dual-income couples feel too time-stressed to return to the days of planned family meals. They live unpredictable lives. At the same time, the growing population of singles and empty-nesters (60 percent of households today consist of one or two people) has less interest in spending time preparing meals.
The current generation of parents reared their children to eat on the run. Many of their offspring taught themselves to cook after they got home from school, which often means popping instant macaroni and cheese into the microwave.
"We've got a generation of shoppers coming up who never learned how to cook from their mother. They never even saw their mother cook from scratch," said Phil Lempert, a supermarket trend-watcher. "They think assembling a meal is the same as cooking one. They don't care about paying twice as much to have somebody else prepare it."
The computer and the Internet brought the workplace into the home. Meanwhile corporate cost-cutting has increased the job responsibilities of the work force.
"Today we don't know where the boundaries of work and home begin and end," said Edie Weiner, a marketing trend-watcher. "So people's eating habits have changed profoundly. They eat at their desks, in their cars and even in smoke break areas."
Patti Jankowski, a single mother from St. Petersburg, knows the feeling. She grazes on weekends, dining on restaurant leftovers from the night before, nibbling on fruit or cheese sticks in the car and munching on junk food at home. But she stopped the between-meal snacking at work after she got a new job at Certegy Payment Systems Inc.
"I don't think we're allowed to keep food in our desks," she said. "I haven't seen anyone else do it yet."
- Cheetos now come in hourglass-shaped plastic containers designed to be grabbed on the run and to fit in auto cup-holders. Calories: 160 per serving; container holds 2.5 servings.
- Ritz Bits are miniature cracker sandwiches with peanut butter inside. Calories: 160 per serving; container holds 3.5 servings.
- Campbell Soup Co. had to develop tiny noodles to fit through the lid of its sippable Soup at Hand. Calories: 170.
- Go-gurt is yogurt in a squeezable tube, a single-serving design that's also being used for pudding and peanut butter. Calories: 80.
- Granola bars that started in health food stores have morphed into products like the Honey Nut Cheerios Milk 'n Cereal Bar. Calories: 160.
