User:Gc20955/Millennial American Cuisine

Millennial American Cuisine

As the 21st century progresses, technological advances have significantly shifted American Millennials' food purchases and their approach to cooking. The rise of the Internet and New Media have seen the proliferation of cooking-related content as well as unprecedented ways to combine food with pop culture, as in YouTube channels such as Binging with Babish, which focuses on demonstrations of recipes from media, or Bon Appetit's YouTube videos by real chefs, each with their own themed show.

Additionally, Meal kit start-ups such as Blue Apron have sought a busy Millennial audience, but as competitors and traditional grocery stores have responded, the avenue has proven less lucrative than originally thought.

However, even in the face of new technologies, cooking and food are still uniquely powerful ways to communicate, and modern technology may actually be able to accommodate for cooking and communication experiences with long-distance family and friends.

Long Distance Food Communication

A study published in 2017 by Margot Brereton, Min Then Chai, Paul Roe, and Alessandro Soro used a technology-enhanced apron and bottle for home cook family members and partners who were long distances away from each other so that they could communicate asynchronously while also cooking. The study illuminated the value of not only cooking as communication regardless of distance but also how specifically technology that was hands-free, not out of place in a kitchen, and asynchronous could help people communicate while cooking through leaving each other messages. Additionally, the study repeatedly highlighted the element of nostalgia and associations with home that only cooking as background noise could bring up.

Millennial Consumption Habits

Delivery Meal Kits

In an age group in which singles and childless couples make up over sixty percent of Millennial households, often with more specific diets than decades ago, at-home cooking kits with both ingredients and instructions have proliferated in recent years, including brands such as Blue Apron. However, in February 2020 the stock had plummeted 80% since its initial public offering, which was $11 USD. The company's generous marketing campaigns of free meal kits were not always successful at keeping new consumers, and since Blue Apron's inception in 2012 other brands have arisen, including HelloFresh and Dinnerly. The company additionally closed its warehouse in Arlington, Texas as over 200,000 consumers dropped out in a year. The company, which sought to create brand loyalty as well as endear itself to busy adults with some dispensable income is now seeking to sell to a larger food manufacturing company with a better and more advanced infrastructure. Additionally, issues inherent to meal deliveries have been issues for consumers, including the impermanent period of learning how to cook from the recipes as well as the large degree of plastic waste from small servings' packagings.

Socially-Responsible Branding

Concern regarding safe labor practices and the environment have been more visible as well as spread throughout society in recent decades with the rise of the Internet, affecting Millennials' sense of social responsibility and thereby consumer habits. Food companies have thus reacted with cause related marketing, which has been shown to be most effective with Millennials. This style of marketing is popular with food manufacturers, but the trend toward seeking ethically marketed products is however notably mitigated by brand loyalty. A study that tested this with specifically chocolate products in which the relevant social issue was ethical cacao farming practices found that men were less likely to respond to displays of corporate social responsibility, as were people of a lower income. This same study also found that environmental concerns had less of an effect in cause related marketing than did social issues. From this it can be seen that generically socially responsible practices cannot be advertised with success with every product.

A 2016 study uncovered that 75% of Millennials would work for a company that practiced corporate social responsibility even if it meant a reduction in their own pay. Generally, Millennial consumers prefer brands they see as trustworthy and authentic. Additionally, a survey of over 13,000 Millennials and over 3,000 members of Generation Z found that over a third of the respondents would stop their relationship with a company over their ethical behavior, and over forty percent of the respondents would begin to purchase products from a company for the same reason.

Youtube

A paper published in 2012 by Jesper Kjeldskov, Kenton O'Hara, Jeni Paay, and Mikael B. Skov explored Youtube videos centered around cooking as an unobtrusive way of observing a multitude of home cooks and how their cooking spaces were affected by a camera. Their findings regarding the videos' observed proxemics and specifically F-formations showed a new formation of over-the-shoulder views, which they concluded was to give a collaborative and demonstrative feel.

Conversely, the filming styles of cooking series such as Tasty, in which the camera is directly facing the countertop from above, or Binging with Babish, which is a third-person view of only the countertop and the host's hands and torso have different framing but similarly are from a very close-up shot.

YouTube has been an avenue for people to engage with cooking in new ways; the food magazine Bon Appetit has seen YouTube as an avenue to digital gain magazine subscribers. Videos include several long running series such as Gourmet Makes by Claire Saffitz, a pastry chef recreating popular snack food items in a test kitchen. In April 2020 Gourmet Makes in particular makes up five of the magazine's ten most viewed YouTube videos. Additionally, individual creators have seen success, such as Andrew Rea's Binging with Babish channel in which he creates food based out of video games, movies, and television shows.

Notably, while both of these channels employ pop culture references in some of their cooking content, both also offer more traditional cooking demonstration content reminiscent of typical cooking shows, with Bon Appétit having other series with less of a theme and Binging with Babish including a separate series on the channel on how to cook rudimentary and more general dishes.