The Stay at Home Diary: week 7

Do we eat differently during lockdown?

London. Do we eat differently during lockdown? This week we look at the UK.

Previously we noticed that directly after the UK Government imposed lockdown, traffic to food related websites increased: food suppliers (i.e. supermarkets), food delivery services & recipe providers.

We’ll now further explore the UK’s changing cooking habits during this time by comparing the visits to two types of recipe website before and during lockdown¹:

1. Mainstream recipes (represented here by allrecipes.com and bbcgoodfood.com)
2. Expert recipes (greatbritishchef.com, whose self-description is “the go-to destination for food lovers in search of recipe inspiration, expert cooking guides”)

Mainstream recipe website traffic has increased during lockdown. Traffic for expert recipe websites stay consistent.

As per in France, the UK lockdown has led to more visits to recipe websites from non-expert cooks. These new visitors prefer to visit mainstream websites due to their reduced cooking ability. This is highlighted by how long visitors to mainstream recipe websites spend on the site before and during lockdown. Before lockdown, the average time spent on mainstream recipe websites was 7mins vs. 10mins during lockdown. These new visitors need more cooking support (so they follow step-by-step recipes) or they need more time to decide which recipe to choose.

To explore if people’s new lockdown browsing habits have led to new eating behaviors we scraped the mainstream recipe website pages visited² by our tracked panelists to see the preparation and cooking time, and level of cooking expertise³ of the recipes they viewed (scraped zones are highlighted on the picture below):

The recipes viewed during lockdown have a lower completion time (43mins) vs. the recipes viewed before lockdown (55mins). Furthermore, the recipes themselves differ. 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):  

Before Lockdown:                                                        

During Lockdown.:

Much like in France, recipes searched for during lockdown:

• Are easier to cook (“easy” is overrepresented on the word cloud)
• Need less fresh ingredients (less searches for meat during lockdown than before it)
• Are more related to treats and bakery (chocolate & cake etc.)

If we may impart our findings into your daily decisions whilst we are in lockdown, indulge yourself, eat well and have the cake! 😊

1. Since 2016, part of our UK panel has accepted to share their navigation/app usage data with us. They all have installed software which monitors their online activities. To avoid seasonal effects (e.g. Easter lamb), we compared the data collected at the exact same period 23/03/20 – 26/04/20 vs. the same dates in 2019. Both samples were national representative (gender, age).  2019 sample size – n=1,123. 2020 sample size – n=1,246.
2. 887 recipes scraped in total
3. Here results are not insightful, as on these websites, most of the recipes are declared as “easy”.