Product Spotlight: A vegetarian feast – in your hand

FoodProcessing.com

Busy Gen Yers or the flavor affluent will find Forkless Gourmet bun meals interesting and worth another purchase.

By Hollis Ashman and Jacqueline Beckley, Consumer Understanding Editors

Hand-held foods have been a mainstay of humanity. Two pieces of matzohs with chopped nuts, apples, spices and wine eaten by the famous rabbi Hillel the Elder in the first century B.C. may be the first documented sandwich. Since then, we have used bread, wraps, tortillas and pitas to make this hand-held mini-meal.

Hot Pockets, a brand developed by Chef America Inc. in the 1980s, moved this technology forward by freezing wrapped sandwiches for later warming in the microwave.

Meanwhile, finding a gourmet, ethnic-inspired, non-meat-based protein food has been difficult. Vegans, vegetarians, and omnivores are looking for better foods that taste great. Trader Joe’s has become a leader in offering gourmet, vegetarian alternatives to popular traditional fare like Hot Pockets. Whole Foods also has some offerings.

Just a year ago, Forkless Gourmet with its Gourmet Bun Meals saw a way to give people authentic ethnic warm meals all wrapped up in a bun. These products had all natural ingredients, signature sauces, oven baked covers and that touch of ethnicity, playing to either the meat or non-meat person who wants to eat on the go and have great taste without a mess.

Understanding the marketplace

Sandwiches always have been an American choice. Sandwiches are the fifth most popular item to eat in-home on Super Bowl Sunday, yet we are preparing 13 percent fewer cold sandwiches today at home. The frozen meal market is estimated at $7.6 billion and is perceived to be fairly mature. However, the frozen snack roll market, which incorporates frozen sandwiches, grew more than 20 percent, according to Mintel International.

Gourmet and ethnic food interests are driven by a desire to satisfy social, emotional and financial goals. So the quest to experience all things Asian or the expansive Mexican kitchen of Rick Bayless becomes the opportunity to realize small pleasures that can make people feel better about themselves for small expenditures of money.

Asian foods have grown 11 percent between 2001-2003, according to Specialty Food magazine. The Food Marketing Institute suggests 7 out of 10 shoppers age 25-39 purchase ethnic foods at least once a month, while frozen Asian snacks are up 50 percent and frozen Mexican snacks are up 142 percent between 1997 and 2002, according to Mintel.

Expand this circle a little further into areas of vegetarianism and raw foods, categories considered part of the "new" lifestyle-based healthy pyramid, and you see the opportunity for Forkless Gourmet.

Forkless Gourmet is leveraging its original bun meal knowledge base to create a hand-held version of an authentic ethnic meal, positioned for the consumer who is taste savvy, ingredient aware, nutritionally oriented and wants real ingredients like organic tofu, grilled mushrooms, and edamame. This product appears to be unique in its bun approach and ingredient blends that are not yet mainstream.

Insights

Gourmet taste in a convenient form can meet a whole series of higher-level desires. Providing health and gourmet on the go address a desire to feel good and to indulge at the same time.

Bread is a subject reviewed in both our Healthy You! and Crave It! studies, which integrate 30 conjoint studies to generate a database that can be used to understand the experience of foods. What we learn about bread in Crave It! is that attributes and emotions are the foundations that drive bread craving. Healthy bread is about taste, price, brand, health, amount of fat and appearance.

Freshness, lots of flavor, a joy for the senses and home cooking are important trade-off elements for bread. So are elements like premium quality and real, simple ingredients. Attributes that are important to healthy frozen meals are taste, price, portion size, appearance, amount of fat, calories, brand, convenience, healthiness, variety, quality and amount of salt. Key trade-offs for frozen meals are traditional meals, indulgent meals, tender and juicy, and heartiness.

Trends: Convenience and health are longstanding consumer trends. The interlocking concerns about health and diet’s impact on health and beauty relate to both food and attitudes toward obesity. Another trend is stress. But consumption of ethnic and gourmet foods can create small "get-aways" in one’s life.

What is gourmet? This is the highest level of an authentic product. The product must go beyond the basic attributes of the product category to deliver differentiating attributes such as appearance, flavor or texture ... and then it must delight with some special twist, such as country of origin, special quality or unique design in product or package. A price premium is both warranted and adds to this experience, as does the "specialness" of the purchase location. Forkless Gourmet has designed these features in by providing a form that is not typical, using packaging that is contemporary yet restrained and selecting ingredients that support the gourmet framework.

Taste: Flavorful menu items and ethnic flavors have been the strongest drivers of sales. A key driver is the focus on Asian, Mexican and other Hispanic flavors via the additions of flavorings like cheeses, spicy seasonings and sauces and gravies.