An Air Fryer on the market at Kroger Marketplace in Versailles, Kentucky, U.S., on Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2020.
Scotty Perry | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Kettle Foods, known for its kettle-cooked potato chips, recently unveiled what it called “the longer term of the potato chip category”: air-fried chips.
The Campbell Soup brand’s snack launch, made with patent-pending technology, is the most recent example of Big Food betting on consumers’ love of all things cooked in air fryers.
In 2022, U.S. consumers spent nearly $1 billion buying air fryers, up 51% from 2019, in response to market research firm The NPD Group. Sales of the cooking appliance have been soaring since 2017, they usually received an additional boost throughout the early days of the pandemic as people cooked more at home.
And now with more employees returning to the office and spending less time within the kitchen, consumers are increasingly turning to the portable convection ovens. Joe Derochowski, home industry advisor on the NPD Group, said the most important draw is the convenience and speed of using the appliance, plus achieving a crispy texture without deep-frying. And food manufacturers wish to capitalize on the trend.
“They are saying necessity is the mother of invention. And on this case, the need is to proceed to grow the highest line,” said Ken Harris, managing partner at Cadent Consulting Group. “One of the best method to grow the highest line is to take behavior that already exists and discover a recent use for that behavior.”
Big food firms like Kraft Heinz and Nestle saw a surge of sales early within the pandemic. When consumers began eating out at restaurants again and cooking less, food manufacturers’ sales still kept growing due to double-digit price hikes. But as shoppers’ grocery bills climbed in 2022, they began buying cheaper options as a substitute, resulting in shrinking volume.
As inflation cools and retailers put pressure on suppliers to stop raising prices, food firms have needed to search for growth elsewhere.
Adam Graves, president of Nestle U.S.’s pizza and snacking division, said the corporate is leaning into the air fryer boom through its frozen food brands, specifically to supply customers more value.
“It’s the most important trend that we’re seeing straight away in modern cooking,” said Graves, who owns two air fryers himself.
Last yr, Nestle launched pizza bites under its DiGiorno and Stouffer’s brands. Each lines’ packaging tells consumers “Try It in Your Air Fryer.” Other Nestle products, like Hot Pockets, now include air fryer cooking instructions alongside directions for heating up within the microwave and oven.
Tyson Foods jumped on the trend relatively early, launching its air-fried line in 2019. The products, starting from chicken strips to its newest addition, parmesan-seasoned chicken bites, contain 75% less fat. Colleen Hall, senior marketing director of the Tyson brand, said the road has reached roughly $100 million in annual retail sales.
Tyson can be a 3rd of the best way through adding air fryer directions to its packaging for its frozen prepared foods.
“For those who have a look at how often it gets used as a preparation method, it’s around 5%,” Hall said. “I believe consumers wish to use it more, they need more options to make use of it. So it’s good timing for us to be putting it on our packaging.”
The air fryer directions are boosting Tyson’s brand favorability, in response to Hall, who cited recent brand health data. She chalked it as much as the convenience of the appliance and the perceived health advantages of the cooking process.
For fishstick maker Gorton’s Seafood, getting more into air frying is a method of holding on to the purchasers it gained during pandemic lockdowns.
“[The pandemic] was a fairly dramatic shift that brought a whole lot of recent households into our category and into the brand,” Jake Holbrook, Gorton’s vice chairman of selling, told CNBC. “And we have worked hard through our messaging and our products to maintain those consumers within the category and keep Americans eating more seafood.”
The bandwagon is filling up
Air frying is the second-most popular method to heat up frozen prepared foods, in response to Holbrook.
The corporate, which is owned by Nissui, got into the trend by putting air fryer cooking instructions on its website. Then it added the directions to packaging. In January, it unveiled Air Fried Butterfly Shrimp and Air Fried Fish Fillets.
Gorton’s launched Air Fried Fish Fillets and Air Fried Butterfly Shrimp nationwide in January.
Source: Gorton’s Seafood
Gorton’s recent butterfly shrimp and fish fillets were cooked by air frying before being packaged, but consumers can heat the seafood up by air frying it again. The products’ packaging touts that it incorporates 50% less fat.
“Everyone will jump on this bandwagon for the following two years while it’s trendy,” Harris said.
Other food makers following the trend include Kellogg, which began including air fryer instructions for its plant-based Morningstar Farms products in early 2021 in response to customer inquiries. Likewise, Hormel Foods has been responding to consumers’ air fryer demand by updating its packaging and adding recipes on its website and cooking videos on YouTube to create Spam fries and Mary Kitchen corned beef hash.
Nestle has gone even further, targeting consumers who have not yet bought an air fryer. In December, it partnered with Insta Brands, the maker of the Insta Pot and its own version of the air fryer, to provide away the appliance. It ran the same giveaway internally at Nestle U.S. for its employees.
Graves estimates that roughly 60% of U.S. households have an air fryer at this point. However it’s not ubiquitous yet.
“For those who benchmark it to a microwave — there is a microwave in practically everyone’s home — the air fryer’s got a protracted method to go,” Harris said.
Still, it’s well on its method to joining the microwave as a staple in U.S. kitchens. In 2022, the air fryer leapfrogged over grills and multicookers to change into the No. 4 cooking appliance, in response to the NPD Group.
“I believe people originally thought [the air fryer] was something that is likely to be a fad,” Tyson’s Hall said. “It’s just like the Nineteen Seventies — people thought the identical thing concerning the microwave.”
