Market and societal factors

The food products market is affected by changing social and economic patterns. For example, many people have more income today compared with 20 years ago. This gives them more money to spend. People also lead busier lives, so they might do more shopping in supermarkets, than traditional shops, and buy more ready-made meals or eat out more, rather than cooking for themselves.

Food developers need to constantly rethink the type of foods that need to be on shop shelves, in order to take account these lifestyle changes. Customers expect to find a wider range of foods, including foreign dishes and food ingredients. There are several reasons for this:

• We travel abroad more frequently and so are exposed to many new types of food.
• We live in a multicultural community made up of many different races and religions - many with their own traditional cuisines.
• There are also numerous cookery programmes on TV that encourage people to try new food ideas.

Many factors affect what people choose to eat. These include age, habits and presentation. Different sectors of the community will choose to eat different types of food, for example the factors that are most likely to convince teenagers to buy foods are convenience, trend, taste, cheapness, but teenagers do not generally care if food is environmentally-friendly.

Consumers are becoming more concerned about what they eat.

• This might be because they have special dietary requirements, which means they can't eat certain products for religious or political reasons, or because certain foods make them feel unwell.
• Some consumers are demanding healthier foods. Healthier diets have less fat, sugar, salt and more fibre. This is one reason why food producers put nutritional information on food packaging.
• Increasingly people who are concerned about health, diet and the environment look for products that are healthier, organic [organic: food grown without chemical fertilisers, pesticides or hormones ], fair trade [fair trade: food obtained by trading on fair terms directly with the growers ] or GM-free [GM-free: a food containing no ingredients which have been grown with the help of genetic manipulation (GM) technology ]