Breakfast has become a lucrative market for operators but dinner is still the king when it comes to being the biggest day part in terms of total sales. MCA’s Gareth Nash has the evening eating details
Oscar Wilde had it right in The Importance of Being Earnest, remarking “you can’t possibly ask me to go without having some dinner. It’s absurd. I never go without my dinner. No one ever does.” Some things never change, including the importance of an evening meal. It is, and likely always will be, the main meal of the day for UK consumers and one few of us go without.
In some ways, breakfast appears a more appealing current focus for operators. After a 7% rise in breakfast visits between 2014 and 2015, UK adults now eat out just as often for a meal in the morning as in the evening. In value terms, total breakfast spend grew by 8% during the same period while dinner spend fell by 4%, the only day part to experience a decline.
Yet, dinner’s importance cannot be understated and it remains, by far, the biggest day part in terms of total sales. The £33bn spent on out-of-home evening meals in 2015 was three times the amount spent on breakfast, a quarter again the size of spend on lunch and double the amount spent on snacks. So, while many chase after the obvious opportunities emerging from a growing breakfast occasion, there is a risk of overlooking the huge elephant in the room that is dinner. And, although currently faltering, it presents a far greater possible prize for operators able to breathe new life into it by better exciting and meeting the needs of today’s consumers.
Despite the overall drop in dinner spend last year, the number of people eating dinner out increased, while their visit frequency remained stable. So, the decrease in sales was actually caused by a lower spend per visit. To understand why this happened, it’s important to consider wider changes in consumer behaviour.
The biggest dinner mission has remained the same, with get-togethers the primary reason for 18% of occasions, unchanged from 2014, so it is still the key occasion operators must address to drive dinner sales. The shift in consumer behaviour has been much more subtle, as faster-paced lifestyles have driven increasingly unplanned and unstructured meal consumption, causing many smaller, but similarly impulsive, convenience-led reasons for eating dinner out to grow in importance. A sixth of all dinner occasions now comprise such missions as travelling home from work or a leisure activity, eating during a business meeting or a break from work/study, while out shopping, or conversely when left with little choice but to eat out when the shopping hasn’t been done! The regular evening routine is now little more than a fading dream for many workers, who find themselves staying later at the office and fitting in their food shopping more sporadically throughout the week. It is clear operators must adapt to these growing, but very different types of dinner occasions.
One notable result of the changing dinner landscape is that operators must consider new approaches to their menu and course structures. The number of multiple-course dinners has fallen sharply, with a 6% decrease in the average number of courses from 2014 to 2015. This has occurred as the proportion of single-course meals shot up from 47% to 56%, with the majority involving just a main dish, but a trend also developing towards consumers just having a starter or dessert.
There are telling differences in the consumer mission depending on the combination of courses ordered. Evening meals involving a main dish preceded by a starter and/or followed by a dessert are more likely to be social or special occasions – times when extra spend and calories can be more easily justified. These are occasions to target with traditional full-course dinners.
On the growing subset of occasions with more convenience-led motivations, extra courses are a much harder sell. When a customer’s intention is only to have one course, as is increasingly the case, how can operators ensure spend levels are maintained, or even grown? In some cases, providing a more compelling reason to order additional courses may help, for instance via promotional offers for multi-course menus. However, promotions may not help with overall spending and, with the bigger picture of shifting consumer behaviours, this solution is likely to be fairly ineffective for many. Operators may just need to accept that they will increasingly have to cater for single-course meals and simply focus on both driving a higher frequency of these and also pursuing tactics to increase spend on them, for example with higher exit prices and suitable encouragement to trade customers up to higher-priced dishes.
Alternatively, a whole new type of course structure could be used to encourage higher spend. Small sharing plates are an example, encouraging customers to order multiple plates, which add up to a higher price than they would spend on an individual main dish. Alternative menu structures such as this, when done well, can also add a great sense of interest and excitement that will help to drive trade among consumers who are increasingly seeking new and different culinary experiences.
Overall, while out-of-home dining has been on the slide, it is far from dead. On the contrary, it remains a vast chasm of potential sales that operators can grasp if their offer can be adapted accordingly to fit with – and drive maximum spend from – a new wave of informal, unplanned occasions, driven by wider shifts in consumer behaviour. What hasn’t changed with consumers though is that, just as for Oscar Wilde many years ago, they will never go without their dinner.
■ Gareth Nash is head of consumer insight at MCA
