Keeping components separate until after they’re steamed heightens consumer appreciation of the meal and retains the taste and texture integrity of each component. The act of combining the components after cooking underscores their freshness. “And because you’re pouring the sauce on yourself, the consumer gets the power of portion control—a powerful idea to consumers,” Partryka says.
Pricing of Café Steamers at a suggested $3.49 puts it at the high end of frozen meals, Partryka concedes, but “it’s still a great value when you’re thinking about analogs like quick-service. It’s hard to find a great-tasting meal solution in quick-service for under $5. We validated this quantitatively with consumers, and it’s a hit with them.”
Salads and Vegetable Dishes: Some big consumer packaged goods companies are applying the customization idea not only to meals and entrees but also to side dishes and salads.
Kraft Foods and Sara Lee’s Hillshire Farm brand are simultaneously fielding new lines of component salads, joining Ready Pac, a California-based produce processor. Kraft’s new Fresh Creations salads—separately packed lettuce, Oscar Mayer meat, Planters nuts, and Kraft cheese and salad dressing—are being tested in Denver and Boston, where ads promote them as alternatives to quick-service salads. And under its South Beach Diet brand, Kraft is rolling out new chicken-salad kits, sans lettuce, in stores nationwide.
Operating on the premise that meat makes a meal, Hillshire Farm has launched a national “Go Meat!” ad campaign featuring its new Salad Entrees. The kits contain meat and other ingredients for making a salad. Customers simply add salad and eat. Sara Lee is spending more than $20 million on a campaign that centers on a 15-second television spot, “It’s lunchtime!”
Ready Pac launched its Asian Style Chicken Salad and Santa Fe Style Caesar Salad kits last fall. Each includes a plastic bowl of lettuce with a “popper tray” that contains toppings like seasoned chicken, wonton or tortilla strips, dressing—and a fork. The company says its Ready Pac Bistro line “draw[s] lunch-time consumers into the produce department,”—and away from quick-serves.
“Our price points are commensurate with a quick-service salad like, say, at McDonalds,” says Ali Leon, director of fruit and vegetable corporate communications for Irwindale, California–based, Ready Pac.
Sandwiches: The possibilities for packaged goods companies to use customized, component-based products to steal share from quick-service sandwich shops are obvious, but the industry has gotten out of the gate a bit slowly in this segment.
The most notable new product in that segment debuted in May 2007. Oscar Mayer Deli Creations Hot Sandwich Melts borrow from the Lunchables line. The new sandwich kits include shaved meats, Kraft cheeses, specialty sauces, and “an innovative sub roll” that heats in the microwave. Consumers construct their sandwich as they see fit before placing it on a microwaveable tray and heating for 60 seconds.
At a suggested price of $2.99, the five varieties of Deli Creations, Oscar Mayer says, provide a non-quick-service solution to a “mid-day meal that seems pretty grim as nearly 40 percent of Americans lunch over a keyboard,” according to Mintel International.
All in all, with this array of customized products, packaged goods companies and the supermarkets that distribute their offerings have put a bigger bull’s-eye than ever before on quick-service concepts. Consumers will soon reveal whether the effort has been worthwhile.