SugarCreek: Brandworthy Food Solutions

Don't look now: Americans are starting to get adventurous at breakfast. With young adults increasingly demanding grab-and-go options at any time of day, the ready-to-eat (RTE) breakfast market is exploding with innovative products and new tastes.

Take, for example, the Chia Company's introduction of their Chia Pod breakfast line— RTE, chia-based breakfast dishes designed to cater to Millennials' demand for healthy offerings, exotic foods and fast, snackified edibles. The line includes two versions of chia-oatmeal mix and one chia-based müesli.

The ready-to-eat (RTE) snack market is of critical importance to many food companies now, because the increasingly influential Millennial generation is hooked on RTE. With their busy lifestyles and often-limited budgets, many young American adults opt to skip traditional, prepare-at-home, sit-down meals and instead substitute a series of small meals or snacks, as their schedule allows, over the course of the day. This trend, known as "snackification" has caused many food producers to scramble to come up with products that meet the demand.

It's called "snackification"— the tendency of modern consumers to substitute a series of snacks over the course of the day in place of the traditional "three square meals" schedule.

Snackification—strengthened by the eating habits of the Millennial generation— has invariably changed American cuisine. Whereas bacon, for example, used to be predominately a breakfast meat, it can now be found as an integral ingredient in burgers, salads and even desserts. And though twenty years ago, it would have been virtually unheard of for a person to order duck at breakfast time, today Huckleberry in Los Angeles serves Roasted Duck Hash. The rules for protein choices have been thrown out; anything goes now.

According to the National Restaurant Association, 73 percent of Americans now say that they make more healthy food choices at restaurants than they did two years ago. So why are we still facing a growing obesity epidemic?

As Americans continue to demand more health-conscious dietary choices, they show no signs of decreasing their overall food consumption. It's a bit of a paradox. Even with pressure coming from all sides — from health providers, employers, insurers, the government and (curiously) the public itself— for someone to do something about the obesity problem, the overall demand for food shows no signs of decreasing stateside.

Do discussions about American eating habits make you shake your head in disgust? Are you one of the millions of Americans who consciously make an effort to eat less red meat because you have been repeatedly told by health and nutrition experts that red meat causes heart disease?

Good news: things may not be as bad as you think!

For years, millions of Americans have been diligently keeping track of how many hamburgers and steaks they eat each month to ensure that they minimize their risk of heart disease. But careful, scientifically backed, research tells a different story.

According to a painstakingly researched piece by Nina Teicholz of the Atlantic, modern Americans don’t, when compared to our earlier ancestors, over indulge in red meat. In fact, we eat only about half as much. However, as both food and health experts know well, instances of heart disease have skyrocketed over the past 50 years.

But, strangely, our “meat eating went down just before coronary disease took off," says Teicholz.