The Renaissance of Ready-Made Meals

Photo: Sandridge Food Corporation

In the beginning, there was the supermarket service deli. And in the deli’s refrigerated cases there were gathered macaroni salads and potato salads and ambrosia salads; and they were good (so long as you were into that kind of thing). And the consumer began watching more cooking shows and dining out in fancier restaurants, making the typical deli salad seem a little passé. And so the consumer said, “Let there be supermarket sushi,” and the supermarket brought forth sushi abundantly. And the consumer tasted the sushi. And behold, it was very good.

Alright, so it may not be the greatest story ever told, but it is the single most-definitive development to take hold of retail food delivery in a generation. As consumers’ intensifying dependence on expediency goes head-to-head with their increasingly erudite tastes, the ensuing battle has driven foods out of the freezer and dry-goods aisles and into the cooling refuge of the deli section.

“It all started with the salad industry,” observes Mark E. Vermylen, vice president, A. Zerega’s Sons, Inc., Fair Lawn, NJ. “Macaroni salad became pasta salad. And then in the supermarket, you started to see some hot products and side dishes and entrées, and the home-meal replacements, and then takeout food.”

Testament to how significant an evolution it’s been, sales of foodservice items through retail channels will likely top $25.3 billion in 2006, up 7.5% from 2005’s projected figure of $23.5 billion, according to the National Restaurant Association, Washington, D.C. That’s what happens when grocery stores go glamorous. Retailers like Wegmans, Wild Oats and Whole Foods have turned grocery shopping into a lifestyle pursuit with products that promise gourmet every day.

Where they’ve really changed how consumers feed their families is in the fresh sections. The average square footage of the fresh prepared-food departments in new supermarkets grew 168% between 1993 and 2002, according to the NPD Group, Port Washington, NY. The stores’ refrigerated sections “have continued to garner more square footage,” notes Terry Dougherty, executive director, Refrigerated Foods Association (RFA), Atlanta.

In addition to sushi, today’s with-it supermarkets sport whirling rotisseries, pizza hearths, artisanal olive bars and, at Draeger’s in San Mateo, CA, a fully tricked-out stir-fry station, complete with surly chef and well-seasoned wok. That’s just the full-service side.

If taking a number and standing in a queue doesn’t jibe with your lunch schedule, turn to the self-serve refrigerator case and grab a ready-made panino, heat-and-eat chicken vindaloo, vacuum-packed eggplant tart or Israeli couscous salad, portioned for one and ready to run—or to stay. Stores are giving over yet more valuable floor space for onsite eating.

Such remodels have already begun to justify themselves. ACNielsen, New York, tracked supermarket traffic in fresh prepared foods for the 52 weeks ending April 22, 2006, and found unit sales of ready-made salads up 14.9%, entrées and sandwiches up 8.8% and 7.1% respectively, fresh-case chili up 24.6% and, for the 13 weeks ending in Dec. 2005—the peak of the soup season —supermarket fresh soups up a whopping 51%.

Numbers this strong belie the popularity of fresh as a mere trend. “We’re past that point,” says Bruce R. Harte, Ph.D., director, School of Packaging, Michigan State University, East Lansing. “It’s now a reality.”

Packaging plays an instrumental role in maintaining the freshness and nutrition profiles of ready-made meals. Photo: Cryovac Food Packaging/Sealed Air Corporation

“Driving the growth of fresh, ready-made meals are several factors,” says Shirley Leonard, marketing manager, Sandridge Food Corporation, Medina, OH. “One is lack of time to cook, and of culinary know-how among younger adults. Consumers want to eat at home, but do not have the time or skills to prepare the meals. The result is fewer meals being made from scratch, and the desire for convenient, ready-made meals and side dishes that taste home-cooked.” She also credits the shrinking of the American household with luring singles and couples to the supermarket. “Fresh-refrigerated foods are typically packaged for one and two persons,” she says, which adds to their convenience while taking off the table the question of what to do with those leftovers. Some see an affinity between fresh-food fever and consumers’ wanderlust vis-à-vis international dining. “With the increasing awareness of flavor profiles and of fresh and healthful foods, consumers are willing to try new and different cuisines, especially if the products are fresh and marketed properly,” notes Dougherty.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Leonard concludes, “The aging baby boomers and growing senior population has led to increasing demand for functional, healthier fresh foods.”

“The concept of ‘fresh’ may be different to different people,” Leonard says. “Is product fresh if it has a 60-, 45- or 30-day shelf life? Is it fresh if it is delivered within 16 hours of receipt of an order?” “Fresh,” at least in the consumer’s mind, appears to exist more as a constellation of connotations than as an objectively identifiable state of being. Some consumers define fresh as a finite timeline spelling out a product’s lifespan. Others apply it to foods that aren’t frozen, canned, dried or otherwise preserved. Still other interpretations associate it with something presumably prepared on site: those “fresh” baked pizzas in the hot-food section or the “fresh” tossed deli salads.

Fresh also implies high quality, notes Harte, “both from the sensory standpoint and from the nutrition standpoint.” Perhaps most responsible for this golden age of freshness is the term’s association with health. “As the baby boomer generation gets older, they’re looking more at health,” says Sean Brady, marketing manager for ready meals, Cryovac Food Packaging/Sealed Air Corporation, Duncan, SC. “So anything ‘fresh’ or refrigerated, from the nutrition and health standpoint, seems the best way to go, as opposed to canned or frozen, where they think there are more preservatives and things of that nature.”

So it’s all a matter of perception. But perception doesn’t always match reality. Martin Mitchell, managing director, Certified Laboratories Inc., Plainview, NY, and technical director of the RFA, believes the irresistible marketing appeal of “fresh,” coupled with its somewhat ambiguous regulatory history, lays the groundwork for inevitable misuse.

Not long after FDA established the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA) of 1990, the agency proposed a standard definition for the term “fresh.” That initial regulatory product proved “not friendly” to manufacturers’ efforts to convey their foods’ generally accepted “freshness,” notes Mitchell. Recognizing that the proposal needed work, FDA asked interested parties to submit ideas for how to protect the consumer from misleading claims and yet “maybe come up with a definition that includes a little more than a raw apple,” Mitchell says.

In 1993, Section 101.95 became part of Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations. It stipulates, “The term ‘fresh,’ when used on the label or in the labeling of a food in a manner that suggests or implies that the food is unprocessed, means that the food is in its raw state and has not been frozen or subjected to any form of thermal processing or any other form of preservation,” save for several exceptions outlined in the regulation. That means no use of the term in a brand name or as a sensory modifier. However, the section permits use of “fresh” in cases where “the term does not suggest or imply that a food is unprocessed or unpreserved.”

So, given that most consumers know milk is pasteurized, labeling it as “fresh” doesn’t violate the requirements; there was never an implication that the milk was unprocessed in the first place. However, FDA has pursued tomato processors for using expressions like “fresh-packed” or “fresh & ready” on canned tomatoes, offering the subtle semantic shift of “packed from fresh tomatoes” as a permissible alternative.

“For most processors, their goal is to sell a product that has some repeat to it,” notes Brady. “And if you can play upon the consumer’s feel of the word ‘fresh’ or ‘no preservatives’ —all those things— and not cross the FDA’s line, then you’re going to use those words on the package.”

Fortunately, the public’s experience with fresh, refrigerated prepared foods has proved positive, both from a sensory standpoint and with the critical issues of food safety. In the dicey game of making and supplying perishable, microbially vulnerable products, that’s no mean feat. Look at pasta, Vermylen explains: “We deliver to our customers a dry pasta that is an extremely low-risk product from a microbiological perspective. It’s dried at roughly 200°F. It’s about the safest thing there is out there. But it’s used in refrigerated fresh foods mixed with much riskier ingredients—often egg, dairy products, and things like that.” And there in lies the difference.

“Most of these products, if they contain dairy sauces and meat products, are quite susceptible to oxidation and microbial growth,” Harte says, “and that can result in quality loss and safety issues.” The who’s-who list of bacteria that pose the greatest safety threat and cause manufacturers perennial concern include: pathogenic E. coli, Clostridium botulinum and Listeria monocytogenes. And while processors have reduced the level of threat to the point that the rare outbreak earns nationwide news coverage—like the recent E.coli outbreak in fresh spinach— fresh-food production presents unique challenges.

“If you put something in a can, and you put it in a retort and sterilize it, those are pretty time-proven techniques that produce the level of safety that consumers expect,” Harte explains. “But if we’re talking about a fresh-prepared product that is not preserved by one of these techniques, you have a lot more opportunity for things to go bad, and you don’t have the protection for it. You can have contamination after or during the preparation process. You could have loss of temperature control in distribution or retailing. People can mishandle it once they’ve purchased it. So, fresh products are actually a lot more vulnerable than products that are traditionally preserved.”

The irony is that consumers view fresh foods as inherently safer and healthier, irrespective of the food-safety landmines. That’s bad enough, but factor in the pressure to extend shelf life to its limits and you set up an almost impossible situation. “One of the things that people are always trying to do is to push that shelf life out farther and farther to broaden their distribution base and the consumption window,” Harte says. “But these products all have very short, finite shelf lives.”

Even the process of determining those shelf lives remains something of a wild card. The federal government imposes no rules on what date to stamp on packages, nor does it spell out the criteria to follow in deciding upon one in the first place. “The marketplace controls things a little because if a retailer keeps selling a 15- day product after more than 30 days,” consumers won’t need a date to tell them it’s gone off, Mitchell says. But for processors who hope to avoid taking things that far, he notes, “The Refrigerated Foods Association can come in and save the day” with the shelf-life determination protocol it has published for manufacturers. Even assuming that a stated shelf life accurately reflects a product’s durability, conditions during distribution and retailing won’t always work in favor of maximizing it. The growth of the distribution network invariably renders cold-chain maintenance and safe handling procedures susceptible to fracture. What happens if a shipper’s refrigeration system breaks down? Or what if the products aren’t stocked and rotated properly? While the Retail Food Code recommends refrigerator-case temperatures of 45°F (Mitchell suggests we lower it to 40°F or, ideally, 38°F), “You can’t send an inspector out to the store every day,” he says.

“Preservatives, from a food-safety point of view, are very useful products,” Mitchell continues. “On the other hand, there’s a large market out there that doesn’t want to touch them.” That market overlaps with the market for fresh prepared foods; those consumers tend to believe that preservatives defeat the purpose of fresh.

“As consumers become more interested in foods with fewer or no preservatives, extending shelf life becomes a moot issue,” says Leonard. “The key is to sell the product sooner, while it is fresher.”

“First of all, you’ve got to know what shelf life you want. Then you design your package system to get that particular shelf life,” Harte says. “What causes the product to go bad? Is it moisture loss? Moisture gain? Is it oxygen? Is it light? Is it microbial growth that you have to control via refrigeration?” And don’t forget nutrient degradation. “If you say that it’s got so many units of vitamin E, then it better still have that many units of vitamin E,” he adds. “You really have to know the product to understand what the package requirements are.”

That includes knowing its distribution profile. National manufacturers are growing the ready-meal market, Brady says, “and their distribution is 3,000, 4,000 miles. They want 20 to 100 days shelf life on the product. That packaging is required to do a lot more than one that’s just a dust cover.” Materials such as ethylene vinyl alcohol and polyvinylidenechloride (PVDC) provide reliable oxygen barriers, as do composites that layer metallized, plastic and paper materials.

Harte says “Consumers look at a material involved in a plastic tray for a fresh, prepared meat dinner and there might be half a dozen different layers of material making up that tray-lidding system.” Not all foods require an impregnable package. Say you’re working with center-of-plate protein. “A high-barrier material works great for you. You maximize your shelf life and you get the best freshness for that product,” according to Brady. A dish comprised of vegetables would turn those recommendations upside down, calling instead for a high-permeability film that permits respiration “and therefore maintains the maximum shelf life of that product, which is typically only going to be in the 10- to 14-day range, versus a meat product, which could be 40 to 100,” he says.

The aerobic environment within the package forstalls the growth of anaerobic C. botulinum which isn’t unheard-of in low-acid, fresh-prepared vegetables. “People want to take a protein and combine it with portobello mushrooms marinated in onions, sauté them all together and put that in one package,” says Brady. “But from a food-safety standpoint, we always have to recommend a nonbarrier film because cooking a vegetable does not kill C. botulinum spores, which are deadly. So we have to tell our customers that they’re going to have to use a non-barrier film for this, but their shelf life is only going to be 10 days.”

The potential danger of an anaerobic environment leads Mitchell to consider MAP for fresh-refrigerated meals “an area of concern.” It may encourage a false sense of security. Spoilage organisms—many of them aerobes —start chipping away at the organoleptics before pathogens wreak their havoc. So, a product will give consumers a sensory warning before it becomes dangerous. “When you put it in a modified-atmosphere packaging,” he says, “you now change the environment.” The exclusion of oxygen may be inhospitable to spoilage bacteria, but it gives anaerobes an edge. Mitchell says, “L. monocytogenes is a facultative anaerobe. It can grow without the presence of oxygen. So what you need to be careful of with MAP is that you do not set up the environment to slow down growth of spoilage organisms such that it allows the pathogens to grow.”

Such concerns are par for the course, notes Brady. “We always have to address food safety, distribution and abuse—all the things that products have always done,” he says. But to remain competitive, “we’re thinking more about how all this affects the consumer’s ease and convenience,” he continues. “The more we build in convenience —what can that package do for me?—the more we hit one of the key drivers for the future.”

One packaging system, called Simple Steps™, is suitable for meat, vegetables and combo ready-meals. Some of its advantages are ease of opening, built-in heat-resistant handles, and ability to go straight from microwave to table. “It’s really a vacuum-skin package,” Brady points out, and a self-venting one, too. As steam builds in the package during heating, the pressure causes the seal to release. The package also stands up to distribution, refrigeration and other supply-chain vagaries. What goes in the package stays in the package—“from the raw state all the way to where it gets to the consumer and they place it in the microwave,” he says. And what fan of fresh wouldn’t like that?

“We can see that the consumer expects us to provide what they’re looking for. And there’s basically no reason to sacrifice on quality,” Dougherty says. “If we stay true to the core principle of delivering a meal that we’d be proud to serve to our own families, we’ll make good on those expectations.” 

Kimberly J. Decker, a California-based technical writer, has a B.S. in Consumer Food Science with a minor in English from the University of California, Davis. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where she enjoys eating and writing about food. You can reach her at kim@decker.net.

Think modified-atmosphere packaging is impressive? The time may soon come when nanoparticles of zinc and magnesium oxide find their way into packages as viable, affordable antimicrobial agents. Researchers at the University of Leeds Nanomanufacturing Institute, Leeds, England, have already achieved promising results with the technology and continue to study the particles’ effectiveness as antimicrobials.

Equally promising are antimicrobial films, whereby “you put a substance into the film that will then migrate out over time and help control the microbial growth of both pathogens and nonpathogens on the surface of the product,” says Bruce R. Harte, Ph.D., director, School of Packaging, Michigan State University, East Lansing. While such films won’t guarantee total pathogen elimination, “the use of antimicrobials in packaging is another tool in the kit to help assure that you have a safe product, just like temperature control, just like using pH and salt, just like hand-washing,” he says.

Packaging insiders also tout time-temperature indicators for shoring up oversight of what happens to fresh meals as they go from here to there. Something of a “black box” for a food’s package, “these are little labels on the package that react to time and temperature abuse so that everyone involved in the cold chain can determine the remaining shelf life of the product and also see if it has been temperature-abused,” says Martin Mitchell, managing director, Certified Laboratories Inc., Plainview, NY, and technical director of the Refrigerated Foods Association, Atlanta.

The technology already exists, although its high cost limits its use. Nevertheless, Harte says: “With all the technology we’re developing electronically and with circuitry, we should be able to incorporate indicators that would tell the consumer and the retailer that a package has been microbially contaminated. I don’t know how far away it is—five years or so, maybe—but I don’t think we’re terribly far away.”

All those fresh meals in the refrigerator case make it look so easy: Just grab the tray of capellini al pomodoro, pop it into the micro and you’re set. If only. The logistics of choosing ingredients for fresh-case meals, like pasta dishes, stretch a product developer’s problem-solving skills. But it’s not impossible.

According to Mark E. Vermylen, vice president, A. Zerega’s Sons, Inc., Fair Lawn, NJ: “The fi rst thing to consider is the processing aspect. A big salad manufacturer needs sturdy pasta, because they’re often cooking in continuous cookers. They often blend the product with some kind of ribbon blender or paddle, which can be pretty tough on the pasta.” Does that mean no more capellini? Not necessarily, he says. The challenge comes from “shapes that, by their structure, have ways of getting caught on a paddle or in a cooker and getting torn apart.” The industry’s solution has generally been to go with thicker-walled shapes. Individually quick-frozen (IQF) pasta is also a good option for fresh meals, as it shifts the cooking step onto the supplier. “But you still have a very stable frozen product that has an extended shelf life until you need it,” Vermylen says. “You can take it out, put some warm water on it to thaw it out, and mix it up right there.” And IQF quality is pretty indistinguishable from fresh, if not better.

In fresh-refrigerated soup, the menace of soggy noodles looms large, but egg white can keep it at bay. “The protein in the egg white strengthens the pasta,” Vermylen explains. “It slows down the water absorption and makes the pasta firmer. It reinforces the protein matrix, controls the starch and slows down the cooking.” The addition is useful in some fresh-refrigerated pasta salads, too, to help bolster a tubular shape, such as penne, against collapsing over time.

Whatever the pasta choice, Vermylen advises not to scrimp on semolina’s quality. “It’s possible to use flour blends,” he says, and those may serve their purpose in a boxed mix or skillet dinner. “But in any prepared food where there’s a shelf-life expectation—and a high-quality expectation—you’ll definitely want to use a premium pasta made with 100% semolina. It makes a stronger pasta.”