Do we eat differently during lockdown?
Cologne. Do we eat differently during lockdown? This week we look again at Germany.
Our previous lockdown diaries focused on changing French and British eating habits during lockdown. The changes to eating habits in these markets were very similar. Out of necessity or fun, new people visited recipe websites, often searching for more basic recipes.
We focused on four German recipes websites. During lockdown, they’ve all had significantly more visits (numbers in brackets show the increase in visits during lockdown):
- gutekueche.de +73%
- backenmachtgluecklich.de +47.1%
- essen-und-trinken.de +25.6%
- kochbar.de 11.0%
But the increase in number of visits (penetration) is more limited.
Recipe websites penetration only increases 2% during lockdown vs. before lockdown, with no differences between genders.
Conversely, to what we saw in in France and the UK, the average visit duration for recipe websites has significantly shortened during the German lockdown, from 9mins on average before, to 7mins during.
To try to understand how these changes in online behavior translate to changes in eating habits, we scraped recipe websites content2 to access the names and cooking requirements of their most viewed recipes (scraped zones are highlighted on the picture below):
Unlike in France and the UK, the average cooking time for recipes in Germany increased from 50min before lockdown to 66min during lockdown. Furthermore, before lockdown 6% of the recipes visited needed more than 2 hours increasing to 10% during lockdown.
Two types of recipes explain this difference:
- Traditional recipes, which require marinade and/or slow cooking.
- Ingredients usually bought ready to use are now homemade (or at least considered to be homemade) e.g. yoghurt, honey and sourdough
Let’s also compare searches on recipe websites before and during 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):
Before lockdown:
During lockdown:
Both before and during lockdown, staples of German cuisine (cream, sauce, soup) and different types of cakes are popular. Two main differences can also be highlighted:
- Bread is searched for more during lockdown (typical of dishes which aren’t sophisticated but take time to make)
- Dishes that use basic ingredients (compared to before lockdown, less meat, no different types of meat)
Unlike France and the UK, lockdown in Germany hasn’t generated new cooks. In Germany, the same people are cooking during lockdown as before. However, they’re dedicating time to recipes they usually don’t have time for, using more simple ingredients (by choice or due to a supply shortages). The question is, is this simply a cuisine trend or does it highlight broader trends of the current period: slowness, back to basics, and the rise of survivalism?
- Since 2016, part of our German 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, 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=1,8053. 2020 sample size – n=1,583. - 859 recipes scraped in total
