Research

Life on the Verge of a Meltdown – Personalizing Shopping with a Toddler

Grocery shopping with a toddler is like shopping with a ticking time bomb. You have a finite amount of time to get your shopping completed before the inevitable meltdown ...

How Two Millennials Personalize Health and Well-Being

Any internet search for "healthy" will show there is no one size, fits-all approach. As a 24-year old type-1 diabetic, I need to take good care of my health, especially through my diet. My husband, Nick, still has a young person's metabolism and ...

Who Decides What’s for Dinner?

When asked who makes the household food decisions, some people may think of the 1950’s model of homemaking, where a stay-at-home wife did most of the shopping and food selection for a family. FMI’s 2019 U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends report indicates ...

Confessions of a Subscription-Service Enthusiast

I’ve always been a pushover for predictive analytics, and I take solace in the fact that I’m not alone among those who relish in custom products and services. According to U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends 2019, I’m one of the 8% of U.S. shoppers who have ...

The 25% Of Us Who Grocery Shop for Ourselves

I’m one of the 25% of grocery shoppers making purchasing decisions solely for myself. As a single shopper, I have my own methods to meet my household shopping needs, but are my shopping habits really that different from co-shoppers, shared shoppers ...

Comparing Grocery Shopping: Brick-and-Mortar vs. Online

Last year, I wrote about how brick-and-mortar grocery stores are alive and well, and looking at the 2019 U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends report we see this trend remains strong. An important indicator is the number of trips that consumers make to brick-...

What Does It Look Like When Grocery Trends Intersect?

What does it look like when all of these trends intersect? It looks like a month in the life of FMI’s Carol Abel, who manages a single-shopper household with a varying grocery list. In one month, Carol shopped at five different grocery stores with ...

Meal Kits: One Man’s Dream Becomes A Reality

According to FMI’s 2019 U.S Grocery Shopper Trends report, 17% of U.S. shoppers have tried a least one subscription-model approach to food procurement, most often online meal kits or grocery deliveries. Men have adopted meal kits at a higher rate ...

How Many Grocery Stores Did You Shop at Last Month?

This year’s U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends report found that the average shopper visits 4.4 different retail banners in a typical month, up from 4.1 last year. While shoppers do spend a significant share of their food dollars at their primary store, ...

Millennial vs Gen Z: 2019 Grocery Shopping Habits

As an older Millennial sibling, I could share a million examples that demonstrate how I differ from my younger Gen Z brother. I like calendar appointments; he prefers his days to be unplanned. I tend to be tidy; my brother lives with a mountain of ...

Over Time, What Brings Grocery Shoppers To The Store?

Come with me on a journey through a time machine to consider the attributes that attract customers to a particular grocery store. When FMI first explored this topic in the 1982 Trends research, at that time called Trends: Consumer Attitudes and the ...

The Mind of a Millennial Mom Grocery Shopper

Let’s go to a place my husband would consider very scary—the inner workings of my mind and how I make a decision about when, where and how I shop for grocery items for my family. I’m suggesting we take this journey together because of an interesting ...

Slice of the Bakery Market

Slicing into the overall bakery market that racked up $59.7 billion in grocery sales in 2018, there are similar diverging preferences for baked goods of all kinds. The first Power of Bakery report, recently released by Food Marketing Institute and ...

How Does FMI Know the State of the Food Retail Industry?

The first ever The Food Retailing Industry Speaks (Speaks) report appeared in 1949. Seventy years later, this report continues to provide the food retail industry with important benchmarks, facts and figures that are used in our advocacy work on ...

The Seafood Category Is Distinct And Intriguing

What reveals the market potential for seafood at retail, given the diversity of products and varying availability and seasonality around the country? The Power of Seafood report – the first in FMI’s “Power of…” series to focus on seafood – shares ...