Dinner Choices in America
Segmentation study identifies key drivers of dinner food choices

NPD Foodworld’s most recent in-depth examination of food consumption is a segmentation study of home-prepared dinners. “Dinner Landscape: Segmentation Analysis of the Home-Prepared Dinner Occasion in America” provides a wealth of information about how and why Americans eat what they do during the dinner hour. What follows is a sample of key findings from the report prepared especially for NPD Insights readers.

The Dinner Landscape report confirms that consumer dinner meal choices are driven by a complex variety of attitudinal factors – consumer wants and needs – and situational factors – such as time of day and scheduled activities. Every eating situation involves varied combinations of these factors, which are called “need drivers.” By developing insight into what’s driving dinner selections, food companies can better understand how to segment groups of consumers based not only on their respective need drivers, but also on the characteristics of the overall dinner meal situation.

The top five statements dinner-meal preparers used to describe the primary reason for specific main-course choices were the following:

  1. It requires little effort (it is easy to make)
  2. It satisfies my hunger
  3. It takes little or no planning
  4. It is made with foods that I have on-hand
  5. I can get the meal to the table quickly

Four of these reasons are related to the consumer’s never-ending desire for convenience. An eye toward ease is also evidenced by the types of foods respondents referenced in relation to satisfying meals that require little effort:
frozen prepared main dishes, sandwiches, skillet dishes, breakfast-type food and macaroni/noodles.

Last-minute decisions about what to make for dinner were quite common. Just one-quarter of respondents said they planned the dinner menu in advance, while 37 percent decided what to cook the same day. Another 37 percent waited to decide until just prior to preparing the meal. Here’s a look at the foods most likely to be selected at the last minute:

  • Breakfast-type food
  • Frozen prepared main dish
  • Sandwich
  • Macaroni/noodles
  • Pizza

Of course, there’s often a disparity between what consumers say they need and what it is that they actually do. According to what consumers reported, one would expect to find frozen dinners and entrees, sandwiches and breakfast foods at the top of consumers’ food prep lists. Here’s what the survey actually turned up:

Convenient, ready-made frozen dinners didn’t even make the top five! Surprisingly, meat – one of the foods that consumers actually spend the most time preparing and cooking – ranked first. Poultry ranked second in the survey. (Note: when meats were broken down by specific type, poultry actually represented the most frequently chosen main course at dinner, accounting for about 14 percent of all dinner meals; beef was the second-most-popular meat choice, accounting for 12 percent of all dinner meals.)

Since many of the high-scoring, easy-to-prepare items scored low in terms of frequency, the Dinner Landscape study investigated combinations of needs that the consumer was looking to satisfy with food choices. Eleven unique situations, or segments, were identified; two of those segments account for about six in ten dinners, as follows:

  • Family-oriented need states led consumer-reported criteria, with 30 percent of all respondents reporting a family-focused reason for choosing the main course to be prepared.
  • Fueling rationales – those that focus on simple food consumption and ease-of-eating – were reported by 29 percent of consumers.

Which of these two situations provided consumers with the most satisfaction? The following table illustrates overall consumer satisfaction with each of the eleven situations:

It’s apparent from this table that “Balanced Family Pleaser” situations are those that consumers found most satisfying and appealing overall. The second and third most satisfying meals – “Special Creations or Celebrations,” and “Family Time Traditions” – suggest it may not be so much what consumers are eating but more about with whom they're eating that makes the dinner meal experience satisfying and fun.

Relative to other meal situations, “Effortless Eating,” the most frequent meal situation, scored lowest overall in satisfaction. It should be noted that this is the largest single segment, accounting for 19 percent of all dinners, but it is the one from which consumers derive the least amount of enjoyment. That said these types of dinner solutions tend to be quick, easy and convenient, so there are undoubtedly opportunities for the industry to find new ways to make them more satisfying to consumers.

The NETPlus Dinner Landscape Methodology
The survey was fielded daily for 12 consecutive months to a nationally representative sample of NPD online consumer panelists age 18 and older. It asked them to tell NPD about yesterday’s dinner meal. The preceding data are culled from responses of nearly 53,000 consumers who ate a home-prepared dinner that they themselves made.

For more information, contact Joe Derochowski at 847-692-1736 or
e-mail joseph_derochowski@npd.com.