Trend of Ready Meals That You Should Know About
When you bundle convenience, nutrition and great taste, consumers respond with their business and their loyalty. Supermarket prepared foods offer up an irresistible blend of the things that bring customers through your doors. This grocery store service has steadily grown from a small segment of sales into a profitable staple.
Source: Supermarket Prepared Foods: 7 Surprising Trends for 2017
The Evolution of Convenience: In our “on-demand” world, expectations of “convenience” are different from what they were just a couple of years ago. In an effort to minimize effort and frustration, products, services, and technologies are rapidly elevating consumers’ perceptions of convenience. Portability is evolving from “grab and go” to handheld solutions for on-the-go, multitasking consumers. Physical store formats are evolving and offering faster service and checkout. Next-day delivery is being overtaken by even faster delivery possibilities as part of a strategy to give customers more options to shop when they want, where they want.
Source: TOP TRENDS IMPACTING CONSUMER FOOD CHOICES IN 2017
With horsemeat in ready meals grabbing the headlines, how did prepared food in foil trays become so popular?
It all started with turkey and television and is now an industry worth £2.6bn in the UK alone. It’s safe to say ready meals are an essential ingredient in what the British eat.
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The roots of the modern ready meal go back to 1950s America and a food company called Swansons, although others had dabbled with them previously.
Source: The rise of the ready meal
Selection of ready-meals
Ready-meals were defined as pre-prepared meals, supplied in the container used for cooking, with no further ingredients or preparation required other than heating. We restricted the sample to supermarket own-brand ready-meals intended as single servings. In all cases, both frozen and chilled ranges were searched for and included if present. One supermarket did not sell own-brand ready-meals at the time of data collection and was excluded from further consideration.
Source: The nutritional content and cost of supermarket ready-meals. Cross-sectional analysis
From Rob Hobson, a nutritionist and food consultant, to Laura Tilt, a registered dietician we had the best in the business inspect all the options.
They picked out six ready meals that you can safely add to your diet (to find out all six pick up the October edition), and we have one of those picks to reveal here.
Rob Hobson describes the Tesco Thai Red Curry as “a tasty and nutritious meal that delivers on protein and fibre, while staying low in salt.”
