Home Cooking Surges
Now that the coronavirus pandemic has forced us to stay at home more than ever, many quarantined people are getting back in touch with their relationship with cooking.
“From the time the coronavirus first hit western countries we saw a spike of around 35% in the number of recipes being shows to our audiences across our network of food and recipes websites,” says Benjamin Christie, Founder & President of Gourmet Ads, “The uptrend in home cooking and recipe searches has us within reach of the number searches we see typically prior to Thanksgiving.”
It’s a nice change of pace in an otherwise unpleasant time. And it’s also influencing quite a few things economically.
Because of the coronavirus, more people are cooking at home.
The coronavirus outbreak has forced many of us as consumers to change our behavior when it comes to cooking at home. You can look at Google Trends and the interest over time for “recipes” as a keyword between February and May. Interest in recipes began to rise in mid-March and hit its peak in mid-April of 2020.
There is no doubt that fewer people are eating out at restaurants in order to save money, but also to reduce the possibility of contracting coronavirus. With more cooking people at home, who exactly is benefiting from this trend? Mostly, it’s the supermarkets, grocery stores, and gourmet providers that are benefiting from the surge in cooking.
So how can companies with the most to reap interact and engage with consumers online? How can they take advantage of a good situation in an otherwise bad situation?
Supermarkets, grocery stores, food companies and gourmet providers are seeing the benefits of people eating in while in quarantine. Many supermarkets today are coming up with recipe ideas and marketing them online in order to help people staying at home know exactly what they will need to order for pickup to make their dinner. Just as well, many people are without work right now or are dealing with reduced hours– that means people want to save money on the grocery products they purchase and will opt for the supermarket’s own inexpensive brand instead of popular brand-name versions.
With more people cooking at home, supermarkets and grocery stores have a real opportunity to expand their consumer base during the COVID-19 crisis. One great strategy to implement in order to increase market share would be to run a campaign with a CRM focus. This campaign should be based around asking consumers for their contact details, including their email addresses. Then, supermarkets and grocery stores could run a series of email campaigns that send out weekly catalogs, discount codes for buying online and picking up in-store, or any other special offers.
So, if you’re tasked with increasing your customer base to your supermarket, grocery store or food product website, now is the time to develop a targeted advertising campaign to take advantage of the trend of more people cooking at home to stay safe. Gourmet Ads is ready to help.
