Teagasc, Bord Bia and UCC will shortly pioneer a new kind of market research to discover how Irish people's lifestyles relate to the foods they eat now and will demand in the future.
This new food-related lifestyle consumer survey will allow the researchers to segment the market and the consumers for various foods, to get a better understanding of what people are buying and why. The traditional demographic models for market research are not used in this new work, which was pioneered by the MAPP Institute in Denmark and currently is being adapted for use here.
This research is especially relevant to the prepared and convenience food sector. After the national survey is completed, the research will be extended into our main export markets, Britain, France and Germany.
This work is all the more important in the light of the recent IBEC report on the food industry, which showed that Irish consumers have less time to prepare food but more money to spend on convenience foods.
"This is a major project for us. We want to get for the Irish food industry an understanding of what type of people are buying their products in terms of lifestyle so they can better improve the focus of their marketing and the development of new products to meet consumer needs," Mr Cathal Cowan, head of the food marketing research group at Teagasc's National Food Centre in Dublin, explains.
"We will be trying to match the lifestyle of consumers with the type of product we should develop."
Over 1,000 consumers nationwide will be surveyed over the coming months. They will be questioned on their attitudes to a range of issues on food. For example, on shopping they will be asked about the extent to which they read labels or take advice from other people on what to buy. They will be asked what cooking methods they use, to what extent they use ready-prepared foods, how much they eat out or order in. They will be asked about the importance of quality, health, nutrition and luxury in foods. Motivation, expectation and eating habits all will be investigated.
"It's a quite sophisticated model. The demographics in it will be minor. We identify clusters of consumers who think differently in terms of lifestyle; you have to find out how many groups there are. You may find the people who are not interested in food are the people who are big into convenience foods," he says.
Another survey the National Food Centre is planning is designed to find the market requirements for new beef products. Mr Cowan says they are trying to put a framework together which will look at what has been happening in the poultry sector and see if it has application for the beef industry. "We want to see why one industry is working better than the other and to see how we can identify ideas for innovative value-added beef products. We're going to try to look at innovation in a marketing context and come up with specific product ideas based on what the consumers are thinking."