Food Focus: November Trends
The holiday season is truly the time to shine for digital recipes. Year after year, we see traffic spike as consumers seek to be the hosts with the most.
For CPG brands, including digital recipes in your holiday activations is a must for winning the busiest cooking season of the year. We dug through data from our +5.4 million recipes to help brands plan and get in front of in-market shoppers who are leading the shopping and planning for holiday entertaining. We learn about the discrepancies between what ingredients shoppers view versus what they purchase, what a ‘normal’ year of holidays means for post-pandemic marketing and more.
What’s Trending?
Year over year, there are all-time favorites that consistently rank at the top of the charts. Contextual advertising is a great way to reach holiday entertainers who are shopping for ingredients to make all of their festive classics, from apple pie to coquito.
Looking at top-performing recipes each month of the holiday season, we see clear patterns emerging.
October kicks off baking season but largely holds steady with weeknight classics that fit the “quick & easy” bill, carried over from back-to-school season.
Come November, holiday fare dominates. Thanksgiving classics and cold weather fixes carry the top spots.
And finally, the further into the holiday season, the sweeter shoppers’ menus seem to be. From coconut coquito to cookie platters, these sweet treats bring with them the connotation of parties and closing the year out with a bang.
Eyes Smaller than their Stomachs!
The difference between what users view and what they shop for varies drastically, particularly at holiday time. To understand these patterns, we analyzed behaviors from our +100M monthly unique shoppers in the 10 days leading up to Thanksgiving weekend. Take a look at how the top 10 ingredients by views differ from those by engagement rate in that time span:
Most viewed ingredients are relatively predictable: salt, garlic and sugar. These are all pantry staples, called for in most recipes. However, when we look at what shoppers are actually buying, we see the makings of seasonal classics take the lead. This is reflected in the most-purchased recipes by their ingredients:
For winning strategies for the holiday season, CPG brands need to keep how their ingredients fit into holiday classics a priority in both messaging and targeting.
Helping Out Hosts
We know that shoppers adopted new skills in the kitchen last year. There’s no doubt that consumers will keep cooking, it’s more so a question of what they’ll use their new skills to make. Recipes that users view versus buy provide clear behavioral tells that clue us into cooking behaviors in American households during the busy seasons. The top 15 in both categories are shown below.
Last November’s most-shopped recipes were clearly dominated by Thanksgiving goods all month long. Meanwhile, November of 2019’s most-shopped recipes tell a very different story: shoppers seeking the balance between being the hosts with the most and easy weeknight dinners.
Having returned to ‘normal’ means having returned to their usual lifestyles, so think beyond turkey day during November. Brands that can make the shopper’s life easier during the hectic holiday season will gain shopper preference. Help them plan for Thanksgiving as well as Thursday night dinner.
Back to Basics
As we look to our fall favorites’ trajectories through November, year-over-year data shows some interesting trends. By and large, traffic levels stay comparable. However, the spikes we can clearly attribute to Thanksgiving weekend were smaller in 2020, due to the lack of festivities.
With consumers thirsty to regain traditions lost during the pandemic, brands should prepare for a “back-to-normal” holiday season. This means classic fall flavors coming back in a big way for Turkey day. Including messaging around reviving those traditions will be key to any successful marketing campaign.