Market Research
20
© BPLanExperts.com
In 2000, Americans drank an average of 38 percent less milk and ate nearly four times as much
cheese (excluding cottage, pot, and baker’s cheese) as in the 1950s. Consumption of beverage milk
declined from an annual average of 36 gallons per person in the 1950s to less than 23 gallons in
2000. Consumption of soft drinks, fruit drinks and ades, and flavored teas may be displacing
beverage milk in the diet. Big increases in eating away from home, especially at fast-food places, and
in consumption of salty snack foods favored soft drink consumption.
Americans’ mid-1990s push to cut dietary fat is apparent in
the recent per capita food supply data, which show a
modest (8 percent) decline in the use of added fats and oils
between 1993 and 1997, from 69 pounds (fat-content basis)
per person to just under 64 pounds. As a result of consumer
concerns about fat and mandatory nutrition labeling
beginning in July 1994, food processors introduced over
5,400 lower fat versions of foods in U.S. supermarkets in
1995—97, according to New Product News, a trade
magazine based in Albuquerque, NM.
Americans in 2000 consumed a fifth (20 percent) more fruit and vegetables than did their
counterparts in the 1970s. Total fruit consumption in 2000 was 12 percent above average annual
fruit consumption in the 1970s. Fresh fruit consumption (up 28 percent during the same period)
outpaced processed fruit consumption (up 2 percent). Noncitrus fruits accounted for all of the
growth in fresh fruit consumption.
