It’s A Wrap For Cooking At Home Consumers Are Spending More Money Eating Out Post-Covid

The days of home cooking and experimenting with creative meals are over, thanks to the disappearance of COVID restrictions.

The percentage of people spending money on eating out versus eating at home has swelled to 53.2%, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, FINURAH reported.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis in the U.S. supported the USDA’s findings. According to FINURAH, the BEA reported spending at restaurants and food-service providers, not including grocery stores, has returned to normal. Eating out is back in style like COVID never happened. According to FINURAH, the USDA recorded that 48.3% of people bought “food away from home” in 2020. That year it marked the start of the pandemic. The difference in the rate of people eating out between 2022 and 2020 was nearly 5% (4.9%).

When COVID restrictions began to shift, people were free to go outside. Hashtags on social media like #WeOutside were not the only means of turning up. FINURAH also reported more people spent more money on alcoholic beverages as COVID restrictions slowed. Spending on alcoholic beverages went up by 13.4% from February 2020 to February 2021. Meanwhile, spending on “food away from home” increased by 6.9% during this period.

In 2020, grocery stores were the place to be. One reason was that grocery stores were the spots you could see other people as long as you maintained a six-feet distance. The other reason was survival. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) published an analysis that revealed COVID resulted in more people buying food from grocery stores than eating out. FINURAH reported the “grocery boom” came to an end last year.

Does the end of the COVID home cooking era mean we should forget all the creative ways to prepare dinner from social media posts? While eating out may seem reasonable with work returning to normal, some recipes are just too delicious to say goodbye to. For example, the Detroit-Style Pepperoni and Pickled Pepper Pan Pizza, try saying that ten times fast! HuffPost reported this pizza recipe as one of the top 10 most-liked recipes on its Instagram during lockdown.