Less Work, More Choice For Seniors to Eat Well
Facts of life: some seniors reach a point where they can’t/won’t cook but they still want to eat tasty but healthy food. Meanwhile, they enjoy shopping and like having an excuse to get out of the house if they can.
There has long been multiple choice from suppliers of meals on wheels in the UK and frozen ready meals delivered to the door. But as far back as January 2011, the Daily Express reported that one local council was cutting its meals on wheels service and advising the elderly to buy ready meals from their local supermarket.
Although an unrelated development, a new packaged brand, On the Menu, claims to be "the first retail brand to produce a range of dietitian-approved main courses and desserts developed especially for seniors." The company has worked with what it describes as industry experts to specifically meet the needs of older people.
Of an estimated four million over-75s living alone in the UK, it is believed that almost 20 percent are malnourished because of difficulties cooking and accessing foods that are "appealing, safe to eat for an older digestive system and providing adequate nutrition," according to The Grocer.
On the Menu’s ingredients and cooking instructions are easy to read with large front of pack messaging and an easy to grip film pull tab. Recipes follow guidelines from both the British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research. Each provides one of the five-a-day vegetable target, is high in protein and low in fat. They are all free of MSG, GMO ingredients and typical irritants for those with digestive system disorders or other sensitivities such as colitis.
The manufacturer aims to sell primarily through wholesalers supplying independent retailers, although The Grocer reports that two supermarket chains have started trials. Using easy to reach local shops is a big sales point.
What was described as a backlash from pensioners’ groups to the elimination of meals on wheels pointed out that if people were able to get to shops, they would not have needed a hot meal delivered in the first place. On the Menu hopes their products will be as easy to obtain as to digest.
Discussion Questions
Is there a demand for specially devised ready meals for seniors? Do retailers do enough to market healthy food to this audience?
As the senior population grows, it will be a smart strategy for grocers and CPG companies to come up with innovative ways to appeal to this segment. Ready meals and home delivery are two ways, but it might be wise to seek advice from the seniors themselves regarding what approach would appeal to them.
One idea…maybe they won’t benefit the most from a single meal that they will be eating alone in their apartment. Maybe marketers should try to reach out to groups and encourage eating together as a way to socialize. Also, of course, pricing will be key for the majority of these consumers who are living on a fixed income.
The best part of this piece is the idea that obtaining food can be used to stimulate thinking, choice making, independence—in short to keep ‘possibilities’ in play. When choice and possibilities decline so does life.
I know this is about how to sell more food to seniors, but if I may comment on something with which I’ve become seriously involved of late…it’s not the food that’s the big issue with seniors, it’s water. Dehydration is significantly linked to unsteadiness and falls. A great deal of what we identify as ‘dementia’ is actually dehydration. And of course it’s one of the reasons why old folks shrink. Dehydrated seniors don’t care even if they eat, never mind where the food comes from.
Truth is about 75% of all of us are seriously dehydrated. A company in California (no connection to me) is about to launch an easy-to-use device that gives an accurate measure of hydration like we’ve never had before – in about 60 seconds. Basically it measures the concentration of saliva. This is going to be a godsend to the medical profession but even more so to those of us with aging parents…heck to ourselves! We don’t drink enough by a long shot and coffee, coke and martinis don’t count.
You just can’t MAKE your beloved mother eat or drink more. So what they drink has to have a bigger hydration impact. And that’s what I’m working on — using frequency or subtle energy technology to make water more deeply absorbable on a molecular level. Totally a non-chemical solution. What we’re aiming at is that one glass of water will have the hydration impact of two to three glasses of normal city water.
The ad that says “Stay thirsty my friends” is just really bad advice.
There is one city I visit that already does this. Phoenix/Scottsdale has a distinct snow bird season with many people visiting for a short time and a large local senior market. Many grocery stores sell a one pound container of flour, half a carton of eggs, one stick of butter, and a month long menu of changing hot meals.
There is a demand for such meals, but as the article points out, one of the issues is that the seniors have to be able to have access to them. For some the meals could be purchased by a loved one or a care giver, but for others it will be nearly impossible to get to and from the store.
Meals-on-wheels type services could provide a store door delivery of these meals on a less than daily basis with a menu of item that could be purchased. That would also provide someone who is checking in frequently to make sure the individual is all right and provide a little human contact.
This strategy will be smart for grocers who serve mobile seniors who can visit the store frequently.
Another strategy to serve this audience is to package easily cooked items like salmon filets in individual hermetically sealed packaging. It would be interesting to know how much of Whole Foods’ business is from seniors who enjoy the selection of sizes right for them, and the ability to test new items.
There’s room to market more healthy food in general. I just saw where a major C-store chain has added many healthy items to its mix. Many supermarketers either don’t or won’t recognize this, and steer customers to Whole Foods and natural food stores.
For seniors specifically, small portions should be offered of perishable foods, if it can be done economically or without gouging the customer. In my mother’s final years, she was forever drinking milk that had gone bad (but didn’t seem to notice), fruits and vegetables that had started to rot, and meat that did not pass the sniff test. I’m sure many people on RetailWire could tell similar stories about aging parents. When I’d take her shopping, I’d buy pints of milk, and portions of meat etc. I knew she’d eat in a few days. She’d of course be horrified at the prices for small portions, but I’d try to hide that from her since I was paying for it all anyway.
Smaller portions of course create all sorts of logistical and pricing problems, and a possibility might be to have a weekly central delivery to senior housing centers to see if it would fly. Frozen foods would be great, but so many of them are so laden with fat, sodium and sugar they just aren’t healthy. If frozen manufacturers could finally get this right on a mainstream significant level, it would be helpful. But I’m not holding my breath.
There are seniors and there are seniors. As I’ve often said, there is a profound danger in attempting to lump large populations into neat little demographic buckets.
In the U.S. the ranks of “seniors” continue to swell—good news for the monolithic demographers. But … many of these seniors live in poverty, are institutionalized or are just fine thank you, meaning that the actual potential size of the market for specialized prepared foods may be small—at the very least different—than people think.
As to the second question, the answer is, “Of course not!” Healthy doesn’t sell as well as salt, sugar and fat—particularly to those that have been eating them for six, seven, eight or nine decades.
This topic would seem like an excellent candidate to be merged with the other (How independent grocers can differentiate themselves). To be sure, a store needs to take care it doesn’t become known as “that old fogey’s place,” and demographics vary, but this seems like a natural avenue for many locales. Prepared foods are “hot” right now…in every sense of the word.
If a program of this type could work, you would think Publix, whose stores are laden with senior shoppers, would be considering such. Marketing to seniors is not as easy as it may seem, given there are so many different mindsets and lifestyles among those that defined as seniors in the U.S.
With all of that said, I do think that selected retailers, who knowingly have a large senior following, ought to be thinking about expanding their nutritional services to this group, particularly as Baby Boomers retire and matriculate into the over 75 group, where nutritional needs change and become vital for a strong quality of life.
As one ages sensory acuity diminishes and this is especially true with taste and smell. Thus why ones appetite goes down, weight loss is observed and to Ian’s point proper fluids in satisfactory volume are not consumed. It is an age related downward health spiral. As a result, unhealthy habits form including wanting more salt and sugar to make the food that is rather bland “appealing.” Not so sure positioning the On the Menu items as dietitian approved is the way to get them flying off the shelf.
I think there are plenty of options in most developed countries. The issue here is ease of preparation. Every age group demands that today. I don’t believe this is a seniors-only challenge.
Absolutely! The aging baby boomers were at the top of the learning curve for whole foods and healthy eating and exercise. And cooking for one is a real waste of energy and time.
Retailers do NOT do enough to market healthy food or healthy ready meals to ANY consumers, young or old. The unnecessary chemicals plus unneeded sugar and salt is ridiculous. Worse yet for seniors the ingredients are written so small on most packaging that to read packaging while shopping is nearly impossible, even with reading glasses! And then there are pull dates which almost no one can decipher and child proof seals that require a trip to a next door neighbor to open the containers.
It is essential to pay close attention to details to keep seniors healthy eating when even the most physically active seniors start to worry about too much salt, too many calories, diabetes, etc. There is a huge market as long as the retailers realize that all seniors cannot be clumped together into one homogeneous market—there are segments which must be targeted quite specifically and sadly most retailers just don’t get the fact that all seniors are not alike and many of them still have teeth, taste buds and sophisticated palates.