Market Overview

As lifestyles diversify, diet, the main component in lifestyle, has become personalized. In association with the advancement of food-tech or smart kitchen, people have started pursuing not only convenience but also optimization of meals according to health and preference of each person. Such an idea is thought to lead to well-being in life. In addition, use of digital transformation to realize food personalization (production of diversified items of food in small amount each) cannot only reduce food loss but can also improve awareness and utilization of local food and under-explored or unused food materials, which can expect well-being of global environment.

The markets of personalized food, recipe planning app, and smart kitchen appliances that are parts of the personal meal solutions market are all still in the midway from the market launch to the growth period and have a small number of market players with limited number of products and services targeted. However, they are supported mainly by young people with high interest in new technologies and high conscious to social contributions. 

Size of the personal meal solutions market in FY2022, comprised of personalized food, recipe planning app, smart kitchen appliances, and food delivery services, is estimated to reach 94.8 billion yen by the sales of businesses.

Noteworthy Topics

Trend of 3D Food Printers

A 3D food printer, or 3DFP, is a printer used for food manufacturing and uses food materials instead of ink. The advantage is the easiness to personalize the food (various food items in small amount each) according to the person’s taste and health, added with good design and sanity (dispense with human intervention). In addition, as long as the same designs and recipe shared and the same ingredients used, exactly the same food can be manufactured repetitively regardless of where the printing takes place.

Because of the property of using pasted ingredients, 3DFP gathers attraction as being able to upcycle the waste or unused materials, manufacture sustainable food such as alternative meat, or as an effective food manufacturing device to reduce environmental loads.

Future Outlook

The personal meal solution market size is still limited as many of the market categories that comprise the market have spent little time since their launches, but the changes and diversification of lifestyles triggered by the pandemic have led more people to be interested in health, which is boosting the food personalization. Hereafter, alignment is expected among the recipe planning app, smart kitchen appliances, and food delivery services such as by Co-op or online supermarkets, which is regarded to accelerate the construction of kitchen tech platforms.

The personal meal solution market size, based on the sales at businesses, is projected to expand to 160.0 billion yen by FY2025 and to 288.5 billion yen by FY2030.

Research Outline