Report: 2024 Thailand Cooking Landscape

Decode the right ingredients and 'why' in the food market

Home-cooked meals have always been a central part of family life in Thailand – and the importance of this was highlighted during the pandemic.

But although people have returned to shops and restaurants, that doesn’t mean we’re seeing a mirror image of life before lockdown. Covid-19 permanently changed some daily habits.

Kantar Worldpanel set out to explore what this means for food brands in the Thailand Cooking Landscape Report 2024.

Some of the key findings of the research include: 

• When buying food, consumers are choosing snacks and convenience items over and above cooking staples.
• Cooking is still a core party of daily life in Thailand, but people are opting for simpler recipes.
• Restaurants are seeing pre-pandemic numbers of customers, but on the home front people are still cooking less often than they did before lockdown.
• Takeaway food is an increasingly popular meal choice, particularly for those in urban areas, and this is disrupting the home cooking market.
• Ready-to-eat meals are also changing the landscape – with urbanites buying these to consume ‘on the go’, and shoppers in rural areas seeing them as a convenient way of having meals at home.
• Consumers need to balance budgeting and convenience, but also want to cook creatively.

Food manufacturers and brands reading the report will find out more about these trends and what is driving them. Armed with this in-depth research that decodes shoppers’ behaviour, they can create relevant offerings and effective strategies that enable them to nurture and grow their brands by remaining relevant in an ever-evolving world.

This provides an overview of the food sector and cooking staples market as it currently stands in Thailand. More in-depth information is available in the full report, which provides specific numbers and analysis around the eating and food shopping habits of Thai consumers, including direct input from the shoppers themselves, who reveal their cooking preferences and how these have changed since lockdown. The insight has been designed to help food manufacturers keep pace with rapidly evolving trends in order to nurture and grow their brands.