Convenience Food 

Convenience food addresses consumers' individual lifestyles like no other segment of the food market. Convenience products fit into the complex daily routines of work, family life, and sports and leisure activities and aim to make them easier, more effective and optimized. On the one hand, this positioning leads to a variety of relevant convenience concepts, from classic frozen and microwave products purchased in bricks-and-mortar stores, to take-away meals and food-to-go snacks, to food kits for the home. On the other hand, these also require a profound individualization of sales channels and logistics solutions that integrate perfectly into the daily routines and changing eating habits of highly differentiated target groups, function around the clock on a short-cycle basis, and allow easy order processing via digital platforms and offer additional services. In addition, there is a need for target group-specific concepts for pricing, package size and packaging design, as well as the corresponding experience-oriented presentation at the physical and digital PoS. In addition to a target group-specific design of convenience food products, long-term and cross-target group trends are also driving the transformation of the convenience sector. These include, in particular, a premium orientation, sustainable consumption based on raw material cycles, or a focus on healthy nutrition produced without highly processed ingredients and chemical substances and enhanced by functional properties. And last but not least, convenience products must also inscribe themselves in the very different lifestyles and value systems of consumers - for example, by presenting new, exotic recipes, rediscovering traditional raw materials and recipes, or celebrating food and food preparation as an event. The total of these developments confronts the convenience market with a high degree of complexity. The challenge is to balance the individualization of products, logistics and distribution channels, pricing and marketing strategies with profitability, speed and efficiency and to ensure a high degree of flexibility and adaptability of the entire value chain in the long term.