In Home Kitchens, the Return of the Recipe
24 July 2012
So Americans don’t cook anymore? That used to be true. The current economic climate has wrought good news for publishers of consumer cookbooks as U.S. households eat more meals at home, reports NPD.
U.S. families are more likely to be eating meals at home today, and the use of recipes is growing as a result, according to Port Washington, N.Y.-based The NPD Group, a leading market research company. A recently released NPD recipe-usage report finds the use of a recipe(s) once a week or more has increased from 37% of households in 2005 to 42% in 2011.
Two-thirds of all homemakers (67%) have used a recipe within the past month, and two in five (42%) use recipes even more often, according to the NPD report, entitled “Recipes are Cooking!” Dinner is the dominant recipe-using occasion. Nearly 38 million U.S. households have used a recipe while preparing dinner in the past week, and on a typical evening, 11 million households used a recipe to cook dinner.
“Cost-conscious American families are eating meals at home more, which means household cooks are in greater need of meal ideas,” says Darren Seifer, NPD food-and-beverage-industry analyst. “Recipes provide the ideas for convenient and good-tasting meals and enable households to stretch food dollars by providing new and creative ways to use ingredients already available at home.”
Growth in recipe usage is being driven primarily by young adults, Millennials. One-half of Millennials, nearly 30 million young adults, are now using recipes at least once a week. Forty-five percent of Generation Xers, or nearly 25 million adults, use recipes at least once a week. Frequent recipe users, those households that use recipes at least once a week, also tend to be traditional families that include children under the age of 18.
“As in-home meal consumption continues to grow, the home cooks’ need for new and interesting meal ideas is going to continue to grow, as well,” says Seifer. “Food manufacturers can take advantage of the advanced planning involved in recipe dishes. If you can promote the right recipe in front of these cooks you are very likely to get on their shopping list.