How are you seeing consumer preferences for breakfast meats changing?

With busier and busier mornings, many people can’t or don’t want to take the time to prepare a full meal or raw meats for breakfast and deal with the clean-up before work. Consumers are craving convenience in their lifestyles, even if it comes at a higher price point. You see innovation in the breakfast meat space continue to focus on products that can be quickly heated and easily consumed; many new products incorporate meat(s) as ingredients into handheld products for easy on-the-go consumption.

Snackables, or snacking items, are of growing interest as well in the breakfast category. We see 49% of consumers eat three or more snacks per day (IRI Fresh Trends Webinar 2024), a 4% increase compared with 2022. And of 63% of consumers who skip breakfast at least once a week, 27% of those consumers eat a snack instead (Technomic Breakfast Trend Report 2021). This is a growing preference that breakfast meats can fit very well into, especially for consumers interested in high protein and/or low carb diets.

Affinity for unique flavors and innovative flavor combinations is on the rise as well. Younger consumers are more open to unique offerings that may be twists on traditional American breakfast flavors or completely different altogether. For grocers, being bold with flavor offerings and having a wider range of offerings is more important than ever.

Breakfast meats are an established and competitive category. Where do you start when thinking about a product innovation?

I always start by thinking about the consumers’ needs first, and I go through a series of questions. What are the unmet needs of consumers for the specific category? How could we fulfill those desires in a product offering? What trends are gaining traction? What is already out there in the market? How can we differentiate from the competition – whether it’s nutrition, flavor profile, packaging and so on?

After we get a better idea on how to meet consumers’ unmet needs and desires, we move into development where we turn those ideas into kitchen prototypes. Throughout development, operational capabilities must be kept top of mind. It’s important to have these in mind so that we don’t set unattainable expectations from the beginning and fail to meet them as we scale up. During development, we also work closely with a variety of vendors and providers to source spices, custom ingredients, vegetables, etc., as we’re developing a product to determine viability.

Once we have an approved formulation, we move into plant trials and consumer testing, where we get some great feedback to inform any tweaks we need to make to our formulation. At any given time, we’ve got about five to 10 products in development, some of which take longer than others to get to market.

Daily’s famously got its roots in foodservice before expanding into retail. How do foodservice trends impact the products you develop for the retail grocery scene?

You see a lot of trends start at foodservice before they hit retail — chefs and people trained in the culinary arts have built their knowledge base for what flavors and ingredients pair well with what, and can test the boundaries on a new concept or trend. The menu adoption cycle is a great example of that, where you see high-end restaurants or local restaurants adopt flavor trends or ingredients first, and as it gains traction, that trend will get picked up by larger restaurant chains as well as niche, then larger retail chains.

Any trends you’re particularly excited about?

For me, I’m interested in the trend of reconstructing the breakfast staples. An example are pancakes, maple syrup and sausage, but they’re combined into mini-pancake sausage bites. Another example is the now infamous egg bite; taking traditional omelet flavors like ham and cheese or bacon and spinach to a perfect on-the-go eating experience. The traditional breakfast flavors and dish combinations are still in demand, but the form they’re delivered in is changing.

Another trend that’s interesting is the growth in worldwide breakfast concepts. As I mentioned, younger consumers are more in tune with worldwide foods, and that includes how other countries do breakfast. One example is jianbing, a street food staple in Chinese culture, which is gaining ground with consumers who want to venture into new experiences or “travel the world with their palate.”

What are you most excited about for the future of Daily’s?

Daily’s has established an incredible reputation as a bacon specialist for over 130 years. While we’ll continue to innovate in the bacon category, we see an opportunity to take that same mindset and commitment to quality into other breakfast meat offerings as well. I’m excited to see the reception to some of our new product launches over the next few months.

Bio:

Eric Hamilton, director of product innovation, has worked in meats and animal agriculture his entire professional career, specializing in further processed meat products. He has his Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Colorado State University, and his Master of Agriculture in Meat Science from Texas A&M University where he first began to study further processed meats such as bacon, ham and sausage. He has over five years of research and development experience and has also undertaken coursework in the culinary arts at The Art Institute of Dallas.