YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT
Translating consumer food mindsets into unique experiences and a dynamic research tool.
CHALLENGE
Identify why consumers eat, order, and shop the way they do to get ahead of food trends and help restaurant operators thrive.
OUTCOME
A report documenting research, insights, implications, and opportunities in consumer dining preferences
A framework with 4 core mindsets that drive consumers and their respective impact and opportunity within food service
An immersive quiz at MyFoodie.ID of eating personas
A consumer research tool for future project topics
IMPACT
Previous research efforts focused on restaurant operators so Relish needed to build a foundation to understand consumers for two reasons. The first was to discover what trends and influences drive consumer purchasing behavior, looking for the effect on restaurant operators and the evolution of society’s broader attitude towards food. This input was instrumental to Gordon Food Service’s new food-centric mission to show GFS as a company of fellow food lovers and culinary nerds, not just a food distributor.
INTRODUCTION
The next generation of consumers has a growing curiosity in the food they eat. With access to limitless information, consumers have more knowledge than ever. Consumers are exploring the social, nutritional, and environmental impacts of their eating habits. GFS recognized the need to get into the minds of today’s consumer to ultimately help restaurant operators, and tasked Relish with the job.
We set out to understand the complexity and fluidity of consumer behavior and mindsets, especially how they flexed in grocery stores, home kitchens, and restaurants. When desires for exploration, ease, and personalized experiences are combined with more knowledgeable and conscious consumers, the bar is set high for food at home and away. Our mission was to discover evolving consumer motivations, influences, and behaviors around food and diet to recognize why people eat the way they do.
Research & Framework
We chose three cities to focus on: Chicago for its pulse on food trends, Los Angeles for its priority on health & wellness and global influence, and Nashville for its heritage of Southern cooking and hospitality. Through conversations with a wide breadth of consumers, we identified ten insights around consumers’ influences (what drives consumers’ food and dining decisions) and behaviors (how do consumers make food and dining choices on a day to day basis).
While trying to craft a set of mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive archetypes, we found it nearly impossible to account for all factors and variables that go into food and dining choices. Consumers made decisions based on time, expense, location, situation, peers, mood, and even effort. Instead, we created an eating mindset framework that describe the motivations behind why people eat the way the do.
Ease - You want to be in and out with no fuss. The food is secondary to getting back to whatever you were originally doing.
Health - You’re typically pretty conscious of the choices you make and how they’ll impact your mind and body.
Fun - You love to try new things, explore new places, and eat for entertainment.
Comfort - You won’t shy away from pampering yourself, indulging in a craving or reliving a certain memory.
Personas
Working with our friends at design firm Love and Money, we took our report and turned it into MyFoodie.ID. Our first step was to use the motivations to create a persona matrix, much like the Myers-Briggs personality test. We created eight distinct personas, much like the Myers-Briggs personality test.
If you read through their descriptions, I’m pretty sure one will sound awfully familiar to you!
(No surprise, I’m a Foodfluencer.)
Consumer Quiz & Research Tool
The truest way to understand MyFoodie.ID is to experience it. Click around, explore the site, and take the quiz and discover your Foodie ID! You have just 60 seconds to answer an ever rotating bank of funny, serious, and obscure foodie questions.
MyFoodie.ID headlined several GFS food shows as a way to connect Relish and our work with GFS employees to demonstrate the value and skills we bring to the table. We were honored to bring MyFoodie.ID to Bon Appétit’s Chicago Gourmet and loved sharing our quiz with fellow food enthusiasts.
The quiz was also a dynamic and flexible research opportunity for Relish and GFS. As an innovation hub, we’re always looking for participants to help us with our next project. The quiz was a way for us to:
recruit consumers who wanted to be a part of future projects or prototype feedback sessions
conduct research around a specific topic by swapping in questions
collect basic demographics like age, gender, and location
