Consumer Insights: Understanding consumer needs behind in-home meals

Knowing as many details as possible about how products are consumed and what consumer needs they are meeting allows us to understand the changing eating landscape. 

Understanding consumer needs

The UK’s 27 million households have a collective 82 billion consumption moments each year, providing a huge opportunity for our industry to influence what people choose to eat. The challenge for AHDB and the wider industry is that each of these is different, making it difficult to analyse consumers’ decision-making. To better understand consumer behaviour, we have worked with Kantar to group meal occasions into clusters, sharing core drivers and distinct needs.

What these clusters allow us to do:

• Understand changing consumer and shopper behaviour
• Look for opportunities and growing trends
• Identify where products aren’t receiving their fair share
• Influence people in their product choices through targeted messaging and marketing

Not only have we looked in detail at these meal occasions but also at the people consuming them. If you would like to know more about how AHDB can help support you to use this segmentation, please send us an email at strategic.insight@ahdb.org.uk

We are using this information at AHDB to help shape our marketing campaigns and increase our knowledge of consumer trends. Using this data, we have already seen a number of successes, such as our New Packed Lunch and Milk Your Moments campaigns. 

We have collated 82 billion consumption moments in to 16 key occasion types

For the purpose of this report, we have focused on four occasions most relevant to our sectors. For insight into the remaining 12 categories, please contact  strategic.insight@ahdb.org.uk