Single Serve is Here to Stay (c/o The Hartman Group)
Certain categories of multi-serve packaged food seem to have some staying power with 3+ person households, primarily because certain brands have enough habitual brand loyalty and appeal within homes that they empower food sharing and result in very rapid consumption rates at the weekly level. Multi-serve packaging makes eminent sense to these consumers, because there is very little time for these foods to go stale once the big bag gets opened. Potato chips are a good example in larger households.
But as America’s households increasingly involve 3 or fewer people, the scope for multi-serve packaging itself starts to look quite bleak. And because the variety of packaged foods has increased, thanks mostly to the rapid influx of specialty foods in recent years, there is so much variety at home these days in packaged “staple” goods that we often rotate frequently between products at the weekly level. This makes it even harder to predict when that large bag of chips or that liter of soymilk will really get finished before they go bad.
Single serve packaging is fulfilling an unmet need to manage waste and to acknowledge our increasingly individualistic eating patterns in a highly fragmented, fickle culture of eaters who think that every day is a good day to try something new in the world of food.
So, the brief was to create a single serving meal packaging/container for a ‘gourmet’ quality meal. It should securely hold three or four meal items, have strong shelf appeal, but also have taken into consideration its environmental footprint.
