HAMILTON, MT - One of the big questions consumers are asking these days when it comes to their daily eating experiences is: Is convenience synonymous with compromise? If you ask Corrie Hutchens, Vice President of Marketing for Local Bounti, the answer is a resounding: No. And the company’s latest launch of its chef-inspired Asian Style Chicken Lettuce Wrap Kit is a testament to that answer.
“Simply put, consumers love chicken lettuce wraps. You see it on foodservice menus and in various restaurants across the nation. Their popularity is really attributed to the fact that they're packed with flavor, they're fun to eat, and they provide consumers with a better-for-you meal option by incorporating butter lettuce as a wrap component instead of a traditional flour or a corn tortilla,” Corrie tells me. “A restaurant-quality meal solution that is prepared at home in about five minutes is the opposite of ‘compromise’ and the height of convenience. From what consumers are saying, Asian-style lettuce wraps are what they want.”
And Corrie has the source to back up that statement. As we noted in a recent story highlighting the launch, American consumers have prioritized chicken lettuce wraps as one of a select group of prepared meal options they wished were available in the produce section of their local market. A win for retailers, and a win for Local Bounti.
“Knowing there was a gap in the marketplace, we listened to consumers which is what we do best, and we responded by introducing our Asian-style chicken lettuce wrap kit. We're trying to bring this idea of a restaurant-quality experience to consumers' homes,” Corrie tells me. “This is an example of what we call healthy convenience, and this healthy convenience meal offering also delivers eight grams of protein and only 120 calories per serving. All in all, that was the impetus for launching this item—to address this gap in the market. We have so much brand loyalty because consumers want it and we are able to deliver time and time again.”
Sprouts Farmers Market is also a fan and is now offering the kits at 194 Sprouts Farmers Markets locations in California and Arizona. The Asian Style Chicken Lettuce Wrap Kit features its own sustainably greenhouse-grown living butter lettuce head coupled with a chef-inspired all-white meat chicken and veggie blend in a tangy stir-fry sauce allowing consumers to make restaurant-quality chicken lettuce wraps at home.
While I would like to stay in that space of “yum” for a bit longer, we instead pivot a bit from what the consumer wants to how Corrie sees today’s consumer changing. Corrie reflects that Local Bounti believes that today’s shopper is going through a new twofold experience.
“On the one hand, we know that COVID-19 and this new post-pandemic world has fundamentally changed consumer behaviors in terms of how they eat and how they shop. The resultant behavior is here to stay. On the other front, we also have inflation and foodservice prices going up, and consumers looking to conserve their pennies and be more mindful about budgeting. So between these two things, what we're seeing is this return to cooking at home again,” Corrie reveals. “This kit and all of our value-added offerings allow retail partners to recapture that share of the stomach that they lost when consumers were going for takeout and going back to fast, casual, and restaurants. It is an exciting time to innovate and partner on the dynamic shifts in the consumer marketplace.”
So, maybe the real question is: How do you ensure convenience is NOT synonymous with compromise? In which case, we can turn to Corrie once again for the answer: Local Bounti and its family of products.
