Key trends in Consumable Foods, Snack and Food Preparation
This led to our next question: What do Thai consumers cook? And which product innovations and communications will capture shoppers’ differing tastes and cooking styles?
The fastest growing categories in urban areas are products that enable people to create meals and snacks instantly, showing that urban buyers are looking for speedier ways to prepare food. We can see evidence of this trend in the following sub-sectors:
Shoppers are looking for products that help them to cook faster and more easily. Most of the categories in this sector are ready to eat (RTE) and ready to cook (RTC) foods, and sales are rising, while raw products like Rice and Frozen Raw Material are declining. Whereas shoppers currently spend around 70% of their Consumable Food budget on Rice, this amount is reducing every year and RTE and RTC products are gaining greater share of wallet. This raises some key questions: Are Thai people still eating rice? Are they consuming it in different, more convenient ways? Or has it been replaced with other Consumable Food categories?
The fastest rising products in terms of share of buyers’ wallets are Sausage and Cold Cut products (Sausage, Bologna, Ham and Bacon). The main growth factor here is a higher number of shoppers in every region, along with increased purchase frequency.
Growth in this sector has been driven by more sharing of snacks during lockdown, and more moments enjoyed at home. Value sales in the Salty Snack category have grown more than 10% YoY for in-home purchase, while out-of-home purchase is still in decline due to national lockdowns and curfews, when shoppers switched consumption from out-of-home to in-home with their family. Shoppers are also buying less often, so they tend to choose larger packs. Purchase volume per trip has seen an 11% uplift in the past year, and volume per buyer has increased 8.5% compared with the same time last year.
The trend for healthy and organic food is on the rise in Thailand, but not in the Snack category. Potato Chips is still the largest segment in Salty Snack, and even after the COVID-19 outbreak it has been able to grow its penetration by around 3%. Other segments are losing buyers, except for Prawn Crackers, Fish Snack and Nuts & Seeds which have maintained or even grown their buyer base – in particular Fish Snack, which grew almost 10% in Q3 2021. Nuts & Seeds has also been growing strongly since before COVID-19.
While Potato Chips is the core snack that Thai buyers prefer, we spotted new growth segments in the Salty Snack category: Other Fish & Sea Snack and Other Salty Snack. This indicates that there is an opportunity for new snacks to capture unmet needs for enjoyment and variety as buyers seek to discover something new outside the mainstream products.
When people began to cook at home, Cooking Oil became indispensable. Worldpanel’s expert team segments this category into two main types: Mainstream (Soybean and Palm) and Alternative Cooking Oil (Rice Bran, Sunflower Seed, Coconut, Granola, Olive etc.). The category overall has grown strongly through the pandemic, with a value increase of over 12% in Q3 2020 and over 20% in Q3 2021.
Mainstream is the segment contributing most to growth, with almost 92% of total value sales. However, Alternative Cooking Oil is gaining a larger share every year, with urban consumers the main buyer base. In contrast, Mainstream Cooking Oil is growing strongly among rural shoppers, and achieving good penetration in both rural and urban areas, but we are seeing some buyers start to move to Alternative Cooking Oil – even in rural areas.
The main buyers of Alternative Cooking Oil are in Greater Bangkok, with urban mid to high income consumers having the highest tendency to spend in this segment. If we consider household size, those with two members are most likely to buy, while mid-sized to large households are sticking with traditional cooking oils like Soybean Oil and Palm Oil.
Do shoppers in Greater Bangkok, Urban areas and Rural areas buy the same products? Our findings here are quite interesting. During lockdown Greater Bangkok and Upcountry Urban buyers purchased more ‘Western’ products like Mayonnaise, Salad Dressing and Spread. Meanwhile shoppers in the Upcountry Rural areas continued to buy traditional Thai food like Cooking Oil, Coconut Milk or Oyster Sauce.