McCormick Net Sales Growth Shows Continuation of Home Cooking Trend

Hobbies and habits picked up during quarantine continue to affect consumers’ cooking behavior, according to spices, seasonings and flavorings company McCormick & Company.

On a call with analysts Tuesday (March 29) discussing the company’s first-quarter 2022 results, Chairman, President and CEO Lawrence Kurzius said sales “continued to reflect the sustained shift to higher at-home consumption” relative to before the pandemic. Net sales grew 3% year over year, and total consumer sales fell 2% after rising 35% the year before.

“On a 2-year basis, … compared to the first quarter of 2020, each region grew sales by double digits,” Kurzius said. “This growth highlights the strength of our categories and importantly, our products as consumers continue to cook more at home, demand for flavor continues to grow.”

However, there are others in the food industry contending that the opposite trend predominates: that consumers are increasingly getting more of food needs met by ordering from restaurants rather than by cooking for themselves.

“The dynamic of the 1950s where somebody would cook six square meals a week and maybe go out once a week is going to be totally the opposite,” Marc Choy, president of Ghost Kitchen Brands, told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in a September interview. “This is how people are going to know how to get their food — by ordering.”

Read more: In-Store Ghost Kitchens Turn Walmart Into Uber Eats Competitor

In fact, while the early months of the pandemic occasioned a widespread shift to eating at home, spending on food away from home is now back on the rise. In December 2019, before the pandemic, food at home (FAH) sales were just 2.6% higher than food away from home (FAFH) sales, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service’s Food Expenditure Series.

In the same month the following year, they were 35% higher. By December 2021, the most recent month on record, the gap was closing, with FAH spending back to being just 7% higher than FAFH. Moreover, these data show that, in a seventh-month period spanning the late spring through early fall of 2021, FAFH spending exceeded FAH.

Moreover, restaurants are gaining share of at-home occasions, according to data from PYMNTS’ 2021 How We Eat Playbook, created in collaboration with Carat, from Fiserv, which drew from a census-balanced survey of more than 5,200 U.S. adults. The study found that restaurant customers are now 31% more likely to purchase meals for off-premises consumption than they are to dine on-site.

Read more: Up for Grabs: Restaurants and Grocers See Path to Picking up 200 Million New Customers

“Even though people are still working from home in many cases … they still don’t necessarily want to be tied up in the kitchen for hours at a time,” Julie Marchant-Houle, U.S. CEO of multinational meal kit company Marley Spoon, told PYMNTS in a January interview.

See also: In 2022, Meal Kits Will Adapt to Be More Convenient

Nearly half of all consumers order from restaurants at least once a week, according to data from PYMNTS’ report Digital Divide: Aggregators and High-Value Restaurant Customers. The study, created in collaboration with Paytronix, which drew from a census-balanced survey of more than 2,100 U.S. adults about their food purchases conducted in the fall, found that 46% of consumers are high-frequency restaurant customers.

View the full report: Digital Divide: Aggregators and High-Value Restaurant Customers