Food Focus: February Trends
In the CPG world, February sets the stage for football activations to reach the end zone, cold and flu remedies to soar and confectionary brands to cover the aisles—physical or digital—in red velvet and heart-shaped boxes. While these tentpole activations happen like clockwork each year, marketers can always benefit from data that provides insight and guidance for seasonal CPG advertising. We dive into our network of 1,500 recipe sites to truly understand the consumer behaviors that surround these major occasions.
Who’s Shopping?
So, what exactly does our audience look like?
Top Recipes
To help brands understand where consumers’ interests lie, here's a look back at the top 10 recipes for February since 2019.
February consistently brings comfort food to the forefront with soups, chilis and other hearty options. February 2021 also introduced baking into the mix at higher than standard levels, a trend to be on the lookout for this coming year.
The Season of Love
There are already whisperings that New Year’s resolutions are a thing of the past. Come February, any remaining healthy eating resolutions have most definitely tapered off and consumers browsing our network of 1,500 recipe sites are ready to indulge in the season of love. Top recipes during the week leading up to Valentine’s day span from comfort food to date-night-at-home meals.
Valentine’s Day 2022 falls on a Monday, meaning more shoppers will likely be celebrating at home, rather than nights out. For confectioneries, Valentine’s Day presents a strategic moment for your brand to re-emerge after potential health spikes in January. However, based on top recipe traffic, it’s clear that sweet treats don’t completely own this timeframe. Brands should seek to understand their place on the at-home date night table and premium brands should take advantage of shoppers’ eagerness to woo their loved ones.
The Flu Fighters
During the sneezy season, certain ingredients are at the top of the carts for our shoppers. If you’re considering a campaign to promote your cold or flu product, but aren’t an ingredient, here are ingredient targeting ideas to create engagement for your brand, based on the high engagement rates that we see.
Football Fanatics
Recipe traffic in our network has consistently grown year over year, and we don’t anticipate that changing.
Occasions like the Super Bowl are the perfect melding of behavioral preferences of shoppers: the comfort and convenience of staying home and regaining access to favorite events. Significant growth in Super Bowl classics goes to show just how much hosts missed these events in 2020.
Ready to incorporate a recipe strategy into your 2022 plans? Don’t hesitate to reach out. Chicory’s contextual commerce approach combines contextual advertising with shoppable tech— driving sales for the world’s leading CPG brands and retailers.