"Millennial parents, just like parents from the generations that preceded them, are increasingly looking to restaurants to take on the task of cooking for their families. Millennials with children increased their restaurant visits by 5% in 2018 compared to prior year, reports The NPD Group. Their visit increase is in comparison to flat traffic growth for the total foodservice industry in 2018, according to NPD, which tracks on a daily basis U.S. consumers’ use of restaurants and other foodservice outlets."

"Millennials overall make the most restaurant visits per capita although their visits have been slowing. As teens and young adults they influenced the growth of the fast casual category, the “fresh” movement, and were early adopters of the hottest sauces and an assortment of ethnic flavors. Now as parents with hectic lives they’re turning to restaurants for convenience. Their outlets of choice for a family meal are quick service restaurants, which includes fast casual restaurants. Millennials with kids made 7.3 billion visits to quick service restaurants in 2018. Dinner is the meal when they are most likely to turn to foodservice, but lunch and morning meal get their share of visits as well."

"Where millennial families choose to eat their foodservice meals or snacks varies with 46% eaten at home, 30% eaten at the restaurant, and the remaining percentage spread out among eating in the car, eating at work, at another location, and other places. When at home, millennial parents will often blend a restaurant item with items they prepared. These types of blended at home meals are forecast to grow over the next few years, according to NPD’s Future of Dinner report."

Over the last six months, according to AudienceSCAN, 31.9% of Parents of Kids 12 and Under have used mobile devices to order food for takeout and delivery. Just because they want to get their food quickly doesn't mean they won't take the time to consider what they're in the mood for. Within the last month, 44% of these consumers have used a search engine to research a product they were considering. They were probably using Google, the preferred search engine of 90.5% of this audience. About 81% won't go past the first page of search results, though.

“'Millennials are and will continue to be important to the restaurant industry,' says David Portalatin, NPD food industry advisor and author of Eating Patterns in America. 'Not only are they a large generational group but their attitudes about food and eating, which they’ve taken through life stages, have a tremendous influence on the foodservice industry.'”  

Restaurants can promote their ease of ordering to Parents of Kids 12 and Under in many ways.According to AudienceSCAN, these consumers are 54% more likely than other adults to find advertising on their mobile apps useful and, just within the last year, 58.9% took action after seeing mobile ads on their smartphone apps or ads they received via text. Also within the last year, these parents have reacted to TV commercials they saw (69%), direct mail ads (64.5%), both digital and over-​the-​air radio ads they heard (58%) and email ads they received (57.4%).

AudienceSCAN data is available for your applications and dashboards through the SalesFuel API. Media companies and agencies can access AudienceSCAN data through the AudienceSCAN Reports in AdMall.