The stove has moved: only half of Russians eat only homemade food

With a difference of a month, VTsIOM and FOM polls recorded approximately the same result: only one in two Russians relies exclusively on their own stove. The rest, with varying frequency, look towards the finished food. In megacities, the trend is more pronounced: for example, in Moscow, 70% of purchased dishes are not neglected. How the function of the kitchen passes to the city — in the material of Izvestia.

In singles: demand increases the absence of family

The fact that the traditional eating scenario is losing ground is influenced by a combination of reasons: lack of time and effort (49%), hedonistic demands (31%), the need to eat "here and now" (22%), fatigue from the kitchen routine (19%)... Loneliness reinforces all these motives. Demographers of the National Research Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences Lidia Prokofieva and Irina Korchagina, who analyzed the results of the census, cite the following figures: in two decades, the proportion of singles in the country has doubled, and in Moscow, households that consist of one person are already more than half; 67% of them are people of working age.

Working and single people — in this category, ready-made food is in demand the most, says VTsIOM. And the growing volume of the product market is a reflection of this demand. Last year, it reached 1.12 trillion rubles, an increase of 18.5%, according to INFOLine. X5 strengthened its leadership (the group's share in sales is 19.3%, 216.4 billion rubles), followed by Magnit (83.4 billion) and VkusVill (75 billion). Mikhail Burmistrov, CEO of INFOLine Analytics, notes that ready-made food is one of the strongest traffic drivers for grocery retail.

Retail chains are dragging in restaurant customers

The trend is expected to continue, and the market volume itself will reach 1.32 trillion rubles by the end of the year. The forecast is fueled, among other things, by the cooling in the catering sector. So, against the background of an increased receipt, transactions in the capital's restaurants and bars decreased by 12% over the year, according to the OFD Platform. A significant part of the visitors to establishments, as Sergey Mironov, chairman of the Coordinating Council of the Federation of Restaurateurs and Hoteliers, already noted in a conversation with Izvestia, goes to the ready-to-eat food segment from retail. Moreover, we are talking not only about the usual shelf in the supermarket, but also about the format of compact stores that combine elements of HoReCa and retail, where they go not for a large consumer basket once a week, but daily for coffee, dinner, and a set of goods from among those missing in the refrigerator.

How do locations check stores for viability

Adapting to the growing demand, businesses are looking for new models for selling food and, as a rule, they test them in locations where the square meter has maximum potential. It depends on the purchasing power of the residents and their spending habits near the house. Realtors name two types of promising sites: areas of mass development with high market activity in the housing segment (for example, in 2025, rent in Moscow rose the most in Timiryazevsky, Savelovsky, Rostokin and Yakimanka) and business-class real estate neighborhoods located near business centers. For example, Yandex. Lavka chose Presnya for its first offline store in the summer of 2024, near the border with Moscow City. However, it did not last long — after a year and a half, the experiment was completed. Details are not disclosed. The express delivery service was moved to a hall with an area of 230 square meters. create a matrix of 3,000 items and prices at the application level. In fact, he provided offline access to the online assortment. But, as Mstislav Voskresensky, managing partner of Directfood and an expert at eGrocery, says, there are almost no examples of successful transformation from an online business to an offline one in the world - "so far, only Amazon has succeeded in the United States, and then through the purchase of the Whole Foods retail chain."

The nature of a classic retailer's business is different — offline is the basis for it, not an "experiment". Therefore, Select Perekrestok recently mastered the same site on Presnya, offering an assortment matrix of more than 3,300 items based on the understanding of its customer, a dominant fresh area, almost three hundred ready meals, a coffee shop with a barista and a wide range of drinks. In other words, a premium location has been replaced by a model that can fully integrate commerce with the role previously shared by cafes and home cooking.

The Russian pace is 2.6 times faster than the global one

The evolution of the "nutrient medium" to the stage at which the purchased dishes will replace the stove is not visible. The cult of homemade food is too strong in our society," says Lyudmila Karpova, an expert at the VTsIOM Analytical Center. But services and retail, experimenting with formats, have already noticeably moved this plate. The Russian market is growing even faster than the global one: 18.5% versus 7% (according to estimates from FnB). Further expansion, according to Karpova, will require, among other things, more subtle work with the perception of the product — and above all, a change in its positioning: from "forced compromise" to "conscious choice," strengthening associations with quality, taste and safety.