Millennial Food and Wine Enthusiasts: Announcing A New Exploratory Study

Evidence that Millennials are food and wine enthusiasts isn't hard to find. When my daughter, Ariella (right), went to Hong Kong two summers ago, most of her photos were of the things she ate -- both before and after they were cooked. The title of her Facebook album "Adventures in Cuisine", sort of says it all.

Two of our Millennial researchers, Sara and Marty of Portland, OR record their meals in area restaurants in a blog, knowourvelocity.com and regularly post reviews on yelp.com. While doing taxes they "discovered a shocking amount of money was spent on dining in and out for just the two of us last year." In March, they travelled to Ireland.

Ariella, Sarah and Marty are all fairly typical of their age group:

• According to Mintel, two out of three Millennials are Cooking Enthusiasts who make an average of 4.4 ‘elaborate’ or ‘gourmet’ meals every six months.

• Millennials’s spend a disproportionate amount of their income on food, food away from home and alcoholic beverages.

• Millennials are driving growth in the beer, wine and bourbon categories. They tend to prefer premium / imported brands.

• Millennials are trading up from fast food in their restaurant choices: 18-24 year olds were the only age group to show a decline in the average number of meals eaten at QSR’s between 2007 and 2008.

• 18-24 year olds are 17% more valuable than the average customer to the leading seven chains of casual restaurants.

With their absolute size and aggregate income expected soon to exceed that of Baby Boomers, it is critical for marketers to understand how Millennials think about their food, beer and spirits choices. But learning about Millennials, and especially trendsetters, can be tricky. They are unlikely to respond to traditional surveys, and their answers are likely to be superficial when they do. By definition, their tastes can change rapidly.They are hungry for newness, and want to know what is emerging and coming next. Because of this mindset they don't get stuck being literal and instead thrive on new ideas and can envision how or why something not yet a part of their world might fit in.

Here's how Marty describes his desire to stay on trend:

I think one of the challenges is always keeping a brand or product 'new' while maintaining the core brand characteristics that drew Millennials to it in the first place. That's certainly true of my own experience anyway. Whether we're eating out or I'm cooking, the underlying motivation is almost always avoiding boredom...hate doing the same things again and again. I think there's a related tendency to want to avoid things (brands, idea, anything) that seems too mainstream. SEEMS being the key word. We've actually shifted our grocery shopping away from Whole Foods for that very reason, in part. All the excitement over 'natural' and 'organic' foods was new and exciting at first, but after awhile it seemed a little too..typical...like we were doing it just because it was the thing to do. Why do I want organic chicken again? What does that even mean? Why do two small chicken breasts cost me $15?

Understanding Millennial food and wine enthusiasts proves to be a very real challenge to marketers who want to learn how to make their offerings appealing. That's why we are starting a unique research project designed to investigate these questions. Here are some of the topics we plan to investigate:

• What motivates their interest in new tastes, flavors and experiences? What is emerging in terms of new tastes, flavors and experiences? What motivates these desires?

• Where do they learn about new food, restaurants, recipes, wine and distilled spirits products? What is the role of word of mouth, on premise consumption and off premise parties? Who do they look up to for recommendations?

• How important are characteristics such as ‘organic’, ‘locally grown’ and ‘hormone free’ in their food and wine choices? Everyone talks about it, but do they do more than make more than token gestures? What exactly what are they doing? What more would they like to be doing?

• How interested are they in travel shows, cooking shows, celebrity chefs and other food and wine media? Which ones are most influential and why?

• What are their different restaurant eating occasions? What drives or triggers a night out? What do they look for in a restaurant experience and how does that vary by occasion or who they are with? How important is the dining experience relative to the food? What would get them to eat out more often?

• How is the economic downturn influencing their overall spending and brand choices? Where are they cutting back and what are they holding ‘sacred’? If they had more money, how would they spend it?

The study will focus on Millennial trendsetters who love food and wine. If you are a marketer interested in partiipating, give me a call!

Who Knew? Millennials Are Foodies

"I am a Millennial, born between 1980 and 1994, and therefore, according to a conspiracy of journalists, sociologists and assorted pundits, a spoiled, overachieving, techno-centric brat. So to fly in the face of all that, I'm enrolling in culinary school." - Sophie Brickman, August 2008

Sophie is not as much of an outlier as she thinks she is. In fact, 2 out of 3 Millennials are what Mintel classifies as 'Casual Cooking Enthusiasts'.

Casual Cooking Enthusiasts are 53% of the total population but 65% of those 18-24 years old. They find cooking a 'pleasurable hobby' and cook an average of 4.4 'elaborate' or 'gourmet' meals every six months, more than 4 times as many as those who 'Avoid cooking' or are 'Non-enthusiastic cooks'. As they grow older and start families, the Mintel data suggests many Millennials will become 'Serious Cooking Enthusiasts'. Serious cooking enthusiasts are 16% of the overall population, but 18% of those 25-34 years old.

Casual Cooking Enthusiasts not only cook more gourmet meals, they also have different attitudes toward food. This means that instead of relying on a diet of Ramen and Easy Mac, Millennial casual cooking enthusiasts are a target for locally grown organic and fresh ingredients. They are more likely to agree with these statements:

You enjoy experimenting with new recipes (86%)

You buy ingredients that are from different countries for specific recipes (61%)

You buy utensils, cookware and other kitchen items if you need them for a new recipe or cooking technique (58%)

You always try to cook with seasonal or local foods (57%)

You are willing to spend more money for the highest quality ingredients (55%)

Millenials have shown a preference for luxury tastes in everything from technology to beer. So it should come as no surprise to see that they are over-represented among foodies. As for Sophie Brickman, she appears to have no regrets about her decision to enroll in culinary school. In February, she posted to her blog that she is enjoying serving gourmet meals to her friends. Here's her description of a bacon-themed moveable feast.

"Enrolling in culinary school turned out to be a prescient kind of life-style insurance. When the economy tanked, my friends and I started cooking. We found that, for a fraction of the price and with a little creativity, we could cook a three-course meal that would cost $45 per person at any reasonable establishment. While the setting is never luxurious (screws routinely fall out of my table, which causes all guests to crowd on one side, for stability,) the food is. It began a few months ago, when I offered to cook a bacon-themed dinner for my boyfriend on his birthday. I had decided to make a salad (boring, save the goat cheese croutons), Beef Bourguignon (which calls for braising cheap cuts of meat until they become "fork tender," a term of expertise I picked up at school and enjoy using almost as much as "mouthfeel") and caramelized-bacon-and-chocolate-chip-cookies (Oh. My. God).

The boys politely slogged through the arugula salad, keeping abbreviations to a minimum, but when I brought out the beef bourguignon, the table became silent. The pasta had clumped together, but they didn't care. One bit into a chunk of braised beef and moaned, quietly. Another crunched on a thick-cut bacon lardon. (We'd been trained to cut our lardons big in school, at the request of our 250-pound instructor: "I didn't get this way by eating lettuce," he said, disparaging the "puny French chefs" who prefer their bacon cut into "teeny crumblings.") They asked for seconds. Then thirds. One excused himself to the kitchen to "tidy up" and licked the pot. By the time I brought out the chocolate-chip cookies, each topped with a thick piece of caramelized bacon, all three were lying on the rug, moaning with gastro-erotic contentment."