Top Stories » Special Features » Profiles & Trends

Over the past year, as I have been conducting focus groups and in-home interviews with my company’s HomeTrend Influentials Panel (HIP), I have been amazed at the number of HIPsters who make it a priority to sit down to eat together as a family for almost every evening meal. In the HIPster households that contain two people or a family, the couple or the family sits down to eat dinner together an average of five nights a week.
What made this finding so amazing to me is that it runs counter to popular opinion. Popular opinion is that, as none other than American Demographics Magazine puts it, “Americans increasingly prefer meals they can make quickly and eat on the run.”

HIP Trend-Setters
HomeTrend Influentials (HIPsters) is the segment of the U.S. population (estimated to be less than five percent of the adult U.S. population) who pick up on new home-related trends much sooner than the remainder of the U.S. population. As such, these influential consumers are the bellwether for predicting changes in the behaviors, habits, and attitudes of mainstream Americans. If HIPsters’ behavior is changing, very likely the behavior of mainstream Americans will be changing within a few years.
Based on what HIPsters are doing today, I can safely predict that the family sit-down dinner is staging a comeback: HomeTrend Influentials want to be able to serve a home-cooked meal made with fresh ingredients to a family who sits down all together to eat the evening meal. And that is good news indeed for manufacturers and retailers of tabletop products. Why? Because as American families begin sitting down to eat dinner together, they are going to start wanting to replace their old dinnerware, flatware, and beverageware.

Modern Shoppers
Still, there is a bit of bad news in all this for manufacturers and retailers of tabletop products: American families are not necessarily going back to their buying habits of yesteryear. The American family might be returning to the old-fashioned practice of sitting down to eat dinner together, but today’s modern women are not returning to the way their mothers and grandmothers prepared meals and cleaned up afterwards. They simply are not willing to spend hours in the kitchen every day preparing a meal made entirely from scratch nor are they willing to spend hours in the kitchen after the meal cleaning up. As a result, they are not buying the same kinds of products that their mothers and grandmothers did.
HIPsters are embracing products and services that will allow them to set a good home-cooked nutritious meal on the table in the least amount of time. That is why such food products as bagged salads and pre-grated cheeses are increasingly popular today and concepts such as Dream Dinners are springing up around the U.S — they allow today’s consumers to provide meals made with fresh ingredients without making them do all of the work themselves. In other words, convenient freshness is paramount.
HIPsters are embracing products that will enable them to slip out of the kitchen faster after dinner. Accordingly, many consumers will simply not buy a food preparation or tabletop item that is not dishwasher safe. If it can’t be washed in the dishwasher, they aren’t going to purchase it. For example, most of the HIPsters who own sterling silver flatware very seldom use it. Why don’t they use their sterling silver flatware very often? Simple — they cannot wash it in the dishwasher.
Another reason HIPsters are escaping the kitchen faster after dinner — they have changed the way they serve the family dinner. For example, one HIPster said that she is “skipping the serving platter part.” She said, “I come from a family where everything had a serving bowl and a special serving spoon. So, you’re not only dirtying up what you prepared the food in but you’re also dirtying up a serving bowl or plate, and then, you’re dirtying up the plates you eat on. There are usually three things that get dirty.”

Home-Cooked Fashion
Americans may be changing the way they prepare and serve the family dinner and clean up afterward but increasingly, they are not willing to compromise. They don’t want to spend hours in the kitchen preparing a meal; however, they still want to be able to present a home-cooked meal made with fresh, wholesome ingredients. They don’t want to transfer the food from pot to serving bowl to plate, but they want to be able to set an attractive table. It is important to HIPsters that they have nice-looking dinnerware, glassware, and silverware, but they don’t want to have to hand wash it. One of the HIPsters recently bought a decorative casserole dish “because it was pretty and not just plain old glass like you’d find in the grocery store.” It fulfilled her need for a product that she could take from kitchen to table and was pretty so she could be proud to put it on her table.
The family sit-down dinner is making a comeback and as a result, cookware, bakeware, and tabletop will be making a parallel comeback as long as they are dishwasher safe and attractive.

Editor’s Note: A.J. Riedel, senior partner of Riedel Marketing Group, is a highly regarded marketing authority and leading forecaster of consumer trends. She has been providing strategic marketing planning services to housewares and home goods companies since 1991. In early 2004, A.J. established a new trend forecasting service called the HomeTrend Influentials Panel (HIP) designed to help manufacturers and retailers to determine if their new products will be embraced by mainstream American consumers.