Penne for your thoughts

As Christmas approaches, our latest research reveals that food and drink are the most popular subscription boxes, as the growing popularity of curated recipe subscriptions is sparking a renaissance in home cooking across the UK.

Barely registering on the radar five years’ ago, the food and drink subscription market was worth an estimated £129.2 million in the UK in 2017. While the most popular type of food is the snacks and sweets category, with 7% of the UK population signed up to these services, this is closely followed by recipe box subscriptions with 6.5% of the UK population signed up to such boxes.

Just under three-quarters (74%) of those consumers signed up to subscription schemes buy into a type of food and drinks service. A quarter (25%) of shoppers are considering or likely to consider signing up to a food and drink service in the future, with the ability to cancel when desired proving to be a key driver of consideration.

Niche tastes and specialised dietary requirements represent a strong growth opportunity

More unusual products that are not easily available in shops, such as Japanese candy, French gourmet specialities and spice blends, also offer an opportunity to service consumer tastes not currently being met by mainstream retailers.

Many of these categories are particularly well suited to small companies, given that demand is unlikely to be sufficiently widespread to attract the attention of larger competitors.

Alessandro Savelli, Founder of Pasta Evangelists said: ‘Consumers have less time than ever before to seek out high quality products. And as our lives have changed, so has the British high street: quality, local butchers have gone out of business and we plan our lives around "the weekly shop", conducted in sprawling supermarkets, which seem a more efficient way of conducting our eating lives. Although this need for convenience means that quality can sometimes take second place

‘After the rise of the ready meal, food subscription boxes have also allowed a nation that had fallen out of love with cooking to begin interacting with food more intimately again, experimenting with new and exotic ingredients and preparing meals from scratch... or, in our case, with a little bit of help from top Italian chefs.’

This is the fifth instalment of Royal Mail’s subscription box series, with a full report set to launch in the coming months.