The FMI Foundation's 2026 Family Meals Month campaign reached more than one-third of Americans, with 96% of those who saw the promotions taking positive actions such as cooking more at home, making healthier food choices and eating together as a family more often.
By: David Fikes, Executive Director, FMI Foundation
Each year, Harris Poll helps the FMI Foundation evaluate the reach of our National Family Meals Month (NFMM) program by tracking the number of people who reported experiencing an NFFM promotion in September. Thanks to our FMI members offering creative activations this year, 35% of the U.S. population reported seeing or hearing NFMM promo materials. This translates into approximately 120 million people being encouraged to eat more nutritionally, enjoy stronger family connections and strengthen more civil interactions by sharing more meals at home with loved ones.
The overall scores are encouraging, but a sharper demographic slice of the data reveals some interesting call outs, with particular group scores far outpacing the general reach of 35%. These include:
- Households with children, which recorded a 56% reach,
- Hispanic households with a 54% score, and
- 56% of Black households reported witnessing an NFFM promotion.
We are very proud that we reached over one-third of America with our benefits of family meals messaging, but the more impressive finding is that a whopping 96% of those who saw a family meals promotion reported taking at least one positive action. Most reported taking several actions, including:
- 43% cooked more meals at home,
- 39% made healthier food choices,
- 37% ate together as a family more often,
- 36% purchased more fruits and vegetables,
- 35% used new recipes,
- 34% began meal planning, and
- 25% purchased more meal solutions to make cooking easier.
As you consider future family meal promotions, you may want to take the following summary recommendations from our Harris poll partners into consideration:
Continue to push online presence. Social media consistently remains the most popular way Americans see the national family meals initiative.
Shoppers continue to show a positive response to seeing the initiative in 2026, saying it was a good concept, was informative, gave them new ideas and inspired more time together as a family. They appreciated the encouragement.
Most shoppers plan to have more family meals because they recognize the economical, physical and mental health benefits, which helps move NFMM from a month promotion to a year-round behavioral change.
If you are interested in seeing the full Harris Poll research findings, please reach out to David Fikes at dfikes@fmi.org or Haley Pearce at hpierce@fmi.org.
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