April 8, 2019 — There is a growing appetite among younger consumers, particularly millennials, for food and seafood that has an authentic story to tell, according to the Norwegian Seafood Council (NSC), which has been working directly with American consumers in recent years – through various focus groups – to understand what drives and deters modern seafood purchasing.
With the primary aim of helping Norwegian fisheries and the country’s aquaculture industry to develop new markets, NSC has been keeping a pulse on the consumption trends dominating in the United States, and has found that when it comes to seafood and other proteins, a good origin story can go a long way.
“Origin matters for the end-consumers,” Egil Ove Sundheim, the U.S. director of NSC, explained to SeafoodSource.
This seems especially so for millennials, the generation responsible for overhauling the ways in which food and mealtimes are experienced, and the demographic set to acquire the majority of purchasing power within the next decade, Sundheim said.
“In five, seven, 10 years, [millennials] will be the most important purchasers of food, as they start to build families,” he said.