Millennials spend significantly less time on food preparation and clean up than other generations, bolstering the idea that they value value-added.
A recent study from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service found “Millennials spend significantly less time on food preparation, presentation, and cleanup — 55 minutes less than Gen X’ers, who spend the most time at 143 minutes. This time observation supports the finding that Millennials purchase more ready-to-eat foods; nearly two-thirds of Millennials reported buying some form of prepared food within the prior 7 days, suggesting a preference for time savings.”
Among other findings, the study showed wealthier consumers of all generations buy more fresh ingredients, including fruits and vegetables.
Among all generations, millennials devote the smallest share of their budget to grains, white meat and red meat, and the most on prepared food, pasta and sugar/sweets.
Millennials’ fruit expenditure was about even with older generations when it was balanced for income, but as they gain wealth, they apportion more of their food-at-home spending to vegetables.
This “suggests that the millennial generation may have a stronger preference for fruits and vegetables compared to older generations,” the study’s authors said.
The study used two data sets: purchases data from 2014 from Information Resource Inc. and stats from the American Time Use Survey and the Healthy Eating Module from 2014.
The whole report can be found here.