Convenience & Snacking

Convenience food and snacks are an important food trend for manufacturers to respond to. Despite consumers being under a greater time-crunch than ever before, the desire for convenience is paradoxically turning their attention away from ready meals. Instead, snacking is on the rise, with the ready meal industry grappling to win consumers back. Tactics such as tapping into the clean label trend are proving effective, as well as tempting consumers with increasingly international flavors. Ideas for increasing sales include:

• Clean-label positioning
• Varied, international flavors
• Sustainable packaging solutions
• Target group oriented portion sizes

Leveraging and boosting food trends

For most consumers, snacking is a part of daily life and always has been. What is changing, however, is the way people think about snacking and what is considered a snack. Snacking will continue to rise throughout 2022 as consumers seek increasing levels of convenience. This will maintain the pressure on the snack ready-meal sector to keep up. According to Innova Market Insights, the snacks category has witnessed a 6% average annual growth over the past five years in terms of launch activity, compared to the ready-meals category which grew at 4% in the past five years (CAGR, global, July 2017 - June 2022).

Convenience & snacking across categories

The table below shows market categories as a percentage (%) of overall F&B launches tracked with a convenience positioning: