Do we eat differently during lockdown?
Paris. Food is a major issue during lockdown:
- What food products are easy to find?
- No, or little access to our favourite take away – most fast food establishments are closed
- We must feed ourselves and that means home cooking!
For some it’s very unusual, for others it’s a cloud with a silver lining. Cooking is a hobby they enjoy, and it matches perfectly to the limitations imposed by lockdown! For both reasons, searches for food and recipes websites (Marmiton.org, cuisineaz.com, cuisineactuelle.fr) have increased significantly since lockdown began. This is shown below by comparing visits to main food websites during the current period vs. the same period last year[1].
The frequency of visits has been greater too – 7 visits in 2020 vs. 4 visits in 2019, with the average duration on such sites more than doubling from 9mins to 21mins.
During lockdown, more people visit food websites. However, there’s still strong differences between genders. Females visit food websites more often and for longer. These figures suggest, that additional visitors aren’t cooking aficionados, but a response to the lockdown environment we’re in. The long visit duration of visit shows either that full websites are browsed until a recipe is found or that a recipe is followed during the visit.
Lockdown has impacted online behaviour, but it’s impacted how we look at food.
We scraped the content of webpages visited2 (Marmiton.org, cuisineaz.com, cuisineactuelle.fr) by our tracked panellists from the 3 main French food websites to see the recipes, preparation and cooking time, level of cooking expertise and the cost of the recipes they viewed (scraped zones are highlighted on the picture below):
We compared this to similar information collected before lockdown. It shows that lockdown cuisine is simpler, cheaper and cooked faster vs. pre-lockdown cuisine. This is because it’s being cooked by less experienced and less skilled cooks.
But how have eating habits changed in relation to those before the global pandemic? We compared the recipes visited before and after lockdown. The word clouds show the frequency of searches for individual foodstuff represented by the words (the larger the word, the more times it’s been searched):
This supports the notion that during lockdown people are looking for recipes which are quick & easy to make. We can isolate two types of recipe style:
- Daily cuisine, based on basic ingredients (eggs, chicken, rice…)
- Novice bakers, making sourdoughs and loaves, as well as sweets and treats
To summarise, the lockdown has created two types of cook: those by necessity and those who want to experience the joy of becoming their very own homegrown pastry chef!
- Since 2016, part of our French panel has accepted to share their navigation/app usage data with us. They all have installed a software/an app which monitors their online activities. Here we compared the measures obtained after lockdown (16thMarch – 20th April) vs. the same dates in 2019. Both samples were national representative (gender, age). 2019 sample size – n=1913. 2020 sample size – n=1,836
- We collected information from the content of the pages visited by our panel members on three major French food websites: Marmiton.org, cuisineaz.com, cuisineactuelle.fr 8,051 recipes scraped from the 15th January – 20th April, 4,223 before lockdown and 3,828 after.
