About food choices > Dietary trends and business
How can understanding dietary trends, food choices and food restrictions help my organization or business?
Individuals’ food choices are interesting. When you put them together in aggregate, they can be very useful, and potentially profitable, for food-related organizations and businesses.
If you’re manufacturing a food, or retailing foods, or putting together a menu, or designing recipes, you’re trying to offer foods that can be eaten by as many people as possible in your audience.
- If you’re manufacturing or cooking a food and use an ingredient that a portion of your target audience won’t eat, you’re probably reducing your potential profits. If you remove it you may have the opportunity to increase your product’s share points.
- If you retail foods, customers who can’t find foods that they can eat will be disappointed and may go to another store or buy a lower-margin food, reducing your potential profits.
- If you operate a restaurant and one person in a group won’t or can’t eat anything on your menu, you’re going to lose the whole group.
- If you provide food services and there are few or no acceptable foods for some of your customers, these people will be unhappy and may go hungry or buy somewhere else.
There are hundreds of reasons why people choose foods. Many people make their food selections based on a complex mixture of reasons, many of which they don’t even consciously realize. Nutrition is very important, but it’s not the only reason people make choices. Most people will not eat all foods, and some foods or ingredients are avoided more than others, often for a number of different reasons. It’s not just about calories, or nutritional numbers, or foods that people are allergic to.
Complex, right? Do you have the resources to track all these variables? We can help.
Contact us to understand how you can finesse your food, product line, recipe, or menu to be as widely acceptable as possible.
