The Joy Of Not Cooking

By Stacy Perman

You're driving from the office, the fuel tank is nearing empty, and so is your refrigerator at home. For Americans ravenous of appetite but starved of time (and in need of an oil change), a quick turn into the Chevron station off Interstate 680 in San Ramon, Calif., is the answer. That's right, Chevron, purveyor of premium gasoline, is serving fresh panini, three-cheese pesto and double espressos along with its usual selection of octanes.

Chevron cooked up its Foodini's Fresh Meal Market earlier this year, the latest player in the $100 billion bake-off known, charmingly enough, as home-meal replacement. You know it better as the store-bought, ready-to-eat food that is supposed to taste as if Mom made it. Foodini's is part of the evolving, highly moveable feast that has become dinner, catering to a country that wants its food fast but restaurant-quality fresh. "I work, my husband works, my daughter dances and plays soccer, and my son plays baseball," says Jan Tulk, an attorney, during her fourth trip to Foodini's. "I'd say I end up cooking about half the time. The rest of the week it's usually fast food. This [pizza, clam chowder, salad] is a lot healthier." Although just a gourmet-pizza toss from the gas pump, Foodini's is decidedly upscale: light jazz, vodka-blush pasta sauce and not a microwave burrito in sight.

Home-meal replacement is the critical battleground between supermarkets and restaurants for consumer food dollars. According to the marketing firm NPD Group in Chicago, of the $691 billion that Americans forked over for food in 1996, 46% was for dishes bought outside the home. And half of that went to takeout. The traditional grocery store is morphing into a catering hall-delivery service. Last month A&P announced that hungry Web surfers can view full menus and in-store specials, and order prepared meals online from one of the company's 700 stores. Restaurateurs are developing delivery systems that can dispatch linguini al dente with alacrity.

But new businesses are also springing up: EatZi's is a Dallas-based HMR supermarket developed by Brinker International that is expanding nationally. For those without time to shop, personal chefs who cook and run are springing into action to save us from a hot stove. "When I come home, I realize we have nothing for dinner, and I don't feel like cooking," says Lisa Bradlow, 33, a publicist in New York City. "It's easier to buy a roast chicken and pop it into the oven. If my husband and I have three home-cooked meals in a row, we congratulate ourselves."

The kitchen seems increasingly a place to pursue cooking as a hobby, not a daily grind. In 1987, 43% of all meals included at least one item made from scratch; in 1997, that dropped to 38%. "There has been a revolution forever to find someone else to cook," says Harry Balzer, vice president of the NPD Group. "We want to eat at home; we just want someone else to do the cooking. That is now the home-meal replacement."

Even as early as 1879, Heinz touted the benefits of its ready-made catsup with this ad: "For the blessed relief of mother and other women of the household." In 1953, a year before Ray Kroc raised McDonald's now ubiquitous Golden Arches, a Swanson food technician named Betty Cronin created the "TV dinner." Back then, when meal preparation took an average two hours, the frozen meal on a three-section aluminum tray was lauded for helping mothers "burdened with baby-boom offspring." Today the once labor-intensive process of preparing a meal has been shrink-wrapped to a tidy 15 minutes.

Credit Boston Market (formerly Boston Chicken) with fomenting the HMR decade. The company, which first featured rotisserie chicken, transformed the notion of fast food by serving the kind of fare one would expect to come piping hot out of the kitchen oven but instead comes straight out of a ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat package. "We offer traditional food that people would cook at home if they had the time or the inclination," says Keith Robinson, chief marketing officer at Boston Market. "It's convenient, accessible, pretty affordable and easier than going to the supermarket. Our competition is Mom." Well, not quite. The 1,159-store nationwide franchise hatched a host of imitators that have added chickens roasting on spits and homey side dishes to their menus.

So consumers are being sated, but many investors are going hungry. Boston Market has produced excellent food and wretched numbers. The company's rapid expansion, a controversial franchising scheme and an overly ambitious menu racked up losses of $224 million on sales of $379 million last year. The stock has been plucked, falling from nearly $40 to $3. Buffeted by high promotional costs and declining per-store sales, the company announced that its three top officers, including co-founders Saad Nadhir and Scott Beck, had resigned. Boston Market quickly installed J. Michael Jenkins, a veteran restaurant executive credited with turning around the ailing Dallas-based El Chico chain.

Nevertheless, Boston Market has fundamentally changed the restaurant industry. More than half the meals ordered in a sit-down restaurant get up and go home to be eaten. According to the National Restaurant Association, this year the entire industry is growing at a modest 3% clip, while takeout is expanding at more than twice that, at 7%. "The restaurant has become a prepared supermarket," says the NPD Group's Balzer.

And the supermarket is slowly becoming more like a takeout restaurant. With more competitors taking a bigger bite out of their profits, supermarkets are steadily increasing their selection of prepared foods. According to a survey by the Food Marketing Institute, 22% of consumers bought ready-made food from supermarkets last year, nearly double the 12% who did so in 1996.

Fleming Companies, an Oklahoma City-based wholesale food distributor and owner of the Piggly Wiggly supermarket franchise, has developed a concept called Chef's Cupboard in 150 of its markets, offering food on a par with Boston Market. Fleming has also begun a new market prototype in Hartsfield, Ohio, called the IGA Supercenter. At the 62,000-sq.-ft. grocery behemoth, shoppers can drop off their kids at an on-site center and monitor them on TVs set up in the aisles; pick up traditional food or a hot entree, or take a lesson at IGA's cooking school; withdraw money at the store bank; pick up their dry cleaning; and send a fax at the business center.

It's a new role for the supers, a migration from being distributors of food to purveyors of meals and services. "Ten years ago, if you asked a produce manager to sell washed lettuce, he'd say, 'Why? People can go home and wash it themselves,'" says consultant Carin Solganik, vice president of Solganik & Associates in Dayton, Ohio. Yet prepackaged salads (O.K., bags of lettuce) have become a $2 billion business.

At Gelson's Markets, an upmarket grocer in Los Angeles, shoppers can order a brick-oven pizza or a chinois chicken salad at an in-store Wolfgang Puck's To Go and dine by a roaring fireplace in a cozy corner of the market--a move that would have once seemed about as down-market as getting ready for a date at the makeup counter at Macy's. The Ukrop's chain, based in Richmond, Va., has been selling prepared meals since the mid-'80s. Today 45% of store space is devoted to selling 130 takeout items, which are freshly prepared, often in front of customers.

If the supermarket is starting to look more like a restaurant, places like EatZi's in Dallas are an unconventional hybrid of the two. Started by Phil Romano, the founder of Fuddruckers restaurant chain, EatZi's serves more than 400 items like poached raspberry salmon ($4.99 a portion) or grilled tenderloin ($19.99 per lb.) prepared by 35 on-site chefs and bakers daily. Shoppers can sniff 100 different kinds of cheeses or make their own six-packs of international and domestic microbrews to the strains of Italian opera.

Romano's gourmet smorgasbord has mouth-watering numbers too. EatZi's has sales per sq. ft. of $1,500, easily outdistancing the $200 at regular grocery stores. Even tastier are EatZi's profit margins. At 12% to 15% of sales, they are more than four times the 2% to 3% that most grocers bag. Having tinkered with the concept for a couple of years, Romano is taking EatZi's national. Already in Dallas and Houston, EatZi's opened last month in Atlanta and will stock shelves in Westbury, N.Y., and Manhattan by the end of this year. "Women come in and say, 'Thank you. I never have to cook again,'" says Romano. "And men come in and say, 'Thank you. I never have to marry again.'"

How far can the trend go? If busy consumers hire a maid to clean their homes, wondered entrepreneur David MacKay, wouldn't they pay someone to come over and make dinner? Voila, the Personal Chef Association was born. Formed in 1991 with five chefs, the organization has mushroomed to 1,400, with 10 to 20 customers each. These culinary fairy godmothers prepare custom meals that cost about $7 to $8 a person, and need only a quick, 15-min. warm-up in the oven. "It's a service whose time has come," says MacKay. "What's for dinner is a problem in this country."

Even that holiday holdout of home cooking known as Thanksgiving seems doomed. A Boston Market survey last year reported that 27 million Americans bought some prepared food for the repast. Charles Webre, 35, an ad executive in New York City, and his clothing-designer wife Priscilla, 35, spent $400 last year for a 12-course store-bought Thanksgiving. "I felt like I cheated," says Charles, who presented the meal on the family china. "I work hard, we have two kids, and my wife is stressed out. We believe in traditional-food values, but we don't have the time to do it ourselves." For harried Americans, time is money, and so long as Mom is out bringing home the bacon, somebody else is going to have to come up with supper.

--With reporting by Rachele Kanigel/San Ramon

With reporting by Rachele Kanigel/San Ramon