National Family Meals Month, created by the Food Marketing Institute (FMI) Foundation takes place each September and was created to motivate Americans to eat more meals as a family in their own homes. The movement has had an affect on 84% of Americans who are now making an effort to plan more family meals at home. Busy Americans who want to achieve this goal they set for themselves need ready to eat meals from grocery stores from time to time in order to succeed.

A Goal Ready to Eat Meals at Grocery Stores can Help

According to a Nielsen Harris poll, "Awareness of the family meals movement is consistently growing from the 2015 launch until today." Last year, those who saw the campaign responded in various ways to it. 42% began cooking more meals in their homes, while 36% made sure to eat at home more often with their families and make healthier foods for family night. Another 35% said that they're buying more vegetables and fruits to prepare for their family dinners.

Still, for busy parents, this goal can seem out of reach much of the time. Grocery stores and promote steps they're taking to help encourage family meals, including ready to eat meals at grocery stores. These can be a godsend to parents who don't always have time to cook healthy meals for family night.

Sue Borra, RD, executive director of the FMI Foundation said that, "Based on our ongoing research, we know hat the majority of consumers (63%) across every generation (millennials, Gen X, boomers and Matures) and across income levels believe it is important to eat at home together with their families/​household. Even more, 85% of consumers with kids at home believe it is important."

According to AudienceSCAN, 50.6% of Prepared Supermarket Meal Shoppers have children living at home. About 39% have the personal goal of eating healthier this year, 23.5% would like to spend more time with family and 24.7% are willing to pay more for healthy or organic food products. However, working parents may not always have enough time to cook at home, so they're going to be on the look-​out for other family meal alternatives. They're 41% more likely than other adults to be willing to sacrifice privacy in order to get ads that are relevant to them and, in the last month, 39.1% have used a search engine to research products they were considering for purchase. Google is the preferred search engine for 88.4% of this audience, but only 17.5% will venture past the first page of results.

Ready to eat meals from grocery stores can extend their offerings beyond the dinner sector. Research from the Food Marketing Institute U.S. Grocery Shoppers Trends 2018 found that, along with the four dinners families eat together on a weekly basis, there are also two breakfasts and two lunches that families tend to eat together as well.

The primary obstacles standing in the way of even more meals being eaten together as a family include being too tired to cook (22%) and not enough time to cook the meals (19%). These are the situations that ready to eat meals from grocery stores can help with.

Supermarkets can boast the time-​saving appeal of prepared family meals through a variety of advertisements. According to AudienceSCAN, Prepared Supermarket Meal Shoppers are 54% more likely than other adults to find advertising on their mobile apps useful to them and, last year, 59% took action after seeing an ad on their mobile smartphone apps or after receiving a text advertisement. About 58% took action after receiving an email advertisement and they're 51% more likely than other adults to click on text link ads on websites. Also, 70.1% of these consumers took action after seeing a TV commercial last year.

AudienceSCAN data is available for your applications and dashboards through the SalesFuel API. Media companies and agencies can access AudienceSCAN data through the AudienceSCAN Reports in AdMall.