What will Britain’s home cooking landscape look like in 2024

It’s been an eventful few years for UK home cooking habits.

First, the pandemic brought a surge in at-home cooking, sending sales of scratch-cook ingredients and home-baking items soaring.

Then, just as habits started to stabilise, the cost-of-living crisis hit and brought fresh turbulence. To manage budgets, shoppers cut down on eating out and prepared simpler meals with fewer ingredients. And with energy costs a major concern, they bought air fryers in their droves.

Now, as grocery price inflation is starting to ease, habits are shifting once more.

So, what’s the latest on the UK’s culinary habits? Which new habits and methods are here to stay and which will prove transient? And how can brands and retailers tap into Britain’s changing home-cooking landscape?

For our latest Grocer Vision webinar, we welcomed experts from Iceland Foods, Gousto, Mars Food & Nutrition and Vypr to analyse the latest home-cooking trends and predict what’s next.

Our panel explored how cooking habits have shifted as a result of the cost-of-living crisis and explain which changes are here to stay, and why. Highlighting how health, sustainability and the desire for convenience are influencing home-cooking trends, and zero in on the most promising opportunities for retailers and brands, including recipe kits, meal delivery and premium, chef-inspired ingredients.

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Meet the panel: 

Nick Reade
General manager, Mars Food & Nutrition UK
Nick Reade is the General Manager of Mars Food & Nutrition UK and has 20 years’ experience working in FMCG in the UK. He started his career at GSK before moving to PepsiCo where he spent 10 years working across Sales, Marketing and Strategic Demand. He then moved to Wrigley in 2015 before being appointed Sales Director for Mars Wrigley UK in 2019. He has been in his current role since May 2023.
Nick is a purposeful leader who creates safety for his teams to be themselves and at their best, believing that anything is possible when people work together. He has a huge passion for learning, development and building connections.

David Lennox
Head of product development, Iceland Foods
David Lennox is currently head of product development at Iceland foods and has been at Iceland for 6 years, where Iceland have put a state of the art development kitchen in place as a real statement of intent to improve innovation and quality in their food offer. Before Iceland he worked at Morrisons head office as senior development chef and was part of the team who launched 11,000 products in 18 months.

Jordan Moore
Senior food development manager at Gousto
Jordan Moore has spent seven years at the recipe box company, enjoying roles in recipe development, food innovation and now leading the food development team to deliver on Gousto’s mission to be the most loved way to eat dinner. In his role, Jordan leverages Gousto’s powerful wealth of data to deliver innovative recipes and food partnerships including previous collaborations with Wagamama, Marmite, Pizza Express and Joe Wicks. As the cooking landscape has evolved over the last few years, Gousto has been at the forefront of delivering for customers’ ever-changing needs, from the development of low-energy recipes to an increasing focus on convenience for those returning to the normality of busy family life.

Ben Davies
Founder of Vypr
Ben is Founder of Vypr, an innovation intelligence platform that gives clients real-time robust data on consumer purchase intent so they can get a deep understanding of the market, for far less than the cost of traditional NPD market analysis. He began his career in the food & drink industry as a Buyer for Sainsbury’s, buying various chilled food categories, before moving to a similar role at the Co-op. From there he began his entrepreneurial journey and has since founded 5 business in total across both the technology and FMCG sectors. He set up Vypr to drive better outcomes in the product innovation process through the use of predictive consumer insight, combining his experience in the FMCG sector with his love of technology.

Julia Glotz
Writer and editor – moderator
Julia is a writer, editor and consultant specialising in food and drink, with more than 15 years’ experience working in trade media. She was on staff at The Grocer for nine years, including five years as managing editor.