Hive to Honey

three in four people think the economy has prompted the average consumer to eat out less often. Yet despite declining visits to restaurants, consumers indicate they are just as loyal (68%), or even more loyal (15%) to the restaurants they frequent.
“In hard times, many consumers crave familiarity and reliability. When choosing to dine out, it’s [...]

“Despite the industry’s self-regulatory system, the vast majority of food and entertainment companies have no protections in place for children,” said CSPI nutrition policy director Margo G. Wootan. “If companies were marketing bananas and broccoli, we wouldn’t be concerned. But instead, most of the marketing is for sugary cereals, fast food, snack foods, and candy. [...]

After years of lackluster sales, potato chip sales jumped 22 percent and tortilla chips 18 percent since 2007, according to the market research firm Mintel International, which said the salty noshes defied the economic downturn.
“People bought more chips during the recession because they’re a good value,” Mintel analyst Chris Haack said in a study of [...]

“There are four reasons why I believe the industry has a strong upside,” said William Johnson, chairman, president and CEO of Heinz Co. “First, the growth potential of emerging markets, where the ranks of new middle-class, brand-conscious consumers are increasing at a rapid rate. Second, the industry’s renewed focus on innovation and marketing in response [...]

Amid signs of thawing consumer spending, US restaurants are starting to walk a fine line between turning diners on with new lower-calorie dishes and tapas-style small plates and turning them off with creeping price increases.
The course change comes as cost-cutting opportunities dwindle and restaurants try to wean still-skittish diners off discounts and special offers.
“2009 was [...]

Boomers have lost the most in terms of retirement and savings, and they have very different spending parameters today,” Lisa Feigen Dugal, PricewaterhouseCoopers U.S. retail and consumer practice leader, tells Marketing Daily. “Gen Y, and to a degree, Gen X, have disposable income in a way Boomers don’t. And they spend very differently. They are [...]

Researchers have noticed that more than half of purchases are unplanned, but shoppers are still able to predict near-perfectly beforehand the amount they will spend. A new study, soon to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research, examines this phenomenon.
The authors approached 175 people entering grocery stores, asking them what items they planned to [...]

Today’s children are a generation of snackers – and they’re not eating nuts and berries. U.S. children consume more than 27 percent of their daily calories from snacks, most of it sugary, salty, high-fat junk, according to a new study in the journal Health Affairs. That equates to nearly three snacks a day, an increase [...]

The 2008 U.S. Health and Diet Survey of more than 2,500 adults from all 50 states and the District of Columbia found that, for the first time, more than half of those surveyed “often” read a label the first time they buy a product. Yet, while the number of consumers reading a food label the [...]

Generations, like people, have personalities, and Millennials – the American teens and twenty-somethings who are making the passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium – have begun to forge theirs: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.
They are more ethnically and racially diverse than older adults. They’re less religious, less likely [...]